Hotel review: Bath’s historic Royal Crescent rolls out the red carpet

‘Good heavens are you going there? It’s my all-time favorite hotel in England,’ commented one friend on hearing of our trip to the Royal Crescent Hotel in Bath. This of course led to great expectations that were more-or-less satisfied.

The Royal Crescent Hotel is at the centre of the finest Georgian crescent of town houses in Bath, arguably the most beautiful city in Britain with its distinguished terraces and magnificent spa facilities, originally built by the Romans. It unites several spacious town houses, a splendid garden and some pavilions to the rear into a bijoux 45-room boutique hotel.

Famous guests

We stayed in the pavilion at the rear, once a residence for the future George IV when he was Prince of Wales three hundred years ago. Famous people still stay here. Our neighbor was the comedian and actor Eric Idle of Monty Python fame who thankfully is now a little old for holding late night parties.

Downstairs in the same building is the excellent Dover House restaurant (click here) where breakfast is taken and you can also sit on the lawn to eat or for afternoon tea, often these days accompanied by a glass of champagne.

Next to this pavilion is another housing a large spa bath house, that is sometimes included in the hotel rate as part of a package. You have the treatments and luxury to match any five-star spa.

Across the finely-tended garden and you trip over a champagne bar terrace before landing back in the main premises with a couple of traditionally decorated Georgian-style reception rooms and the hotel lobby.

Naturally there are many fine rooms and suites in this section of the hotel that benefit from the Georgian’s simply outstanding taste in high ceilings and room proportions. But then after all this terrace was originally built for the aristocracy visiting Bath to take the medicinal waters so it was always intended to be somewhat palatial.

Lost cardigan

The hotel is well run by very capable staff who take a pride in working in such a stylish establishment. But there were a few failures on points of detail. A cardigan checked in at dinner time had mysteriously disappeared when eventually reclaimed a day later without any explanation or apology for this gross mistake.

Items of luggage are also often left unattended in a lobby that can be easily accessed by anybody from the road, and several guests on Trip Advisor noted this seemed very insecure. These small details matter when things go wrong as we found out. The cardigan has not reappeared to date.

That said we would still recommend this hotel highly to anybody visiting Bath as the best place to stay. The rooms could do with a little updating, and the plumbing could be less noisy but the general ambiance is quite outstanding and still worthy of its lofty reputation.