The story
Take a breath and look down the long, straight spine of Great Pulteney Street. You are standing on what is arguably the most magnificent boulevard in all of England. Completed around 1789, this is a thousand feet of architectural perfection, a sea of honey-colored Bath stone that seems to glow from within when the sun hits it just right.
It was not built merely as a place to live; it was designed as a grand stage set for the Georgian elite to see and be seen, a place where the performance of high society played out daily against a backdrop of neoclassical elegance. As you begin your walk, notice the staggering scale. At a hundred feet wide, it is vastly broader than the narrow, winding medieval streets of the old city center behind you.
This was the ambitious vision of Sir William Pulteney, once the wealthiest man in Britain, who commissioned the architect Thomas Baldwin to create a residential masterpiece that would rival the grandest avenues of Europe. Unlike the crescents and squares elsewhere in Bath, which curve and tuck away, Great Pulteney Street is a bold, straight line of absolute symmetry. The facades are uniform, creating the illusion of one single, colossal palace stretching into the distance.
Now, let your eyes drift toward Number 10. This particular townhouse holds a story of fallen empires and secret reinventions. In 1846, a man known then as Prince Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte—the nephew of the great Napoleon—took up residence here.
At the time, he was a political exile, having recently escaped from a French prison disguised as a common laborer. While living behind these very windows, he was not just a quiet refugee; he was a man in waiting, plotting his return to the world stage. He paced these floorboards and walked these very pavements, perhaps looking out at the same vista you see now while dreaming of his eventual rise to become Emperor Napoleon III.
Bath offered him the dignity and the distance he needed to rebuild his image before he transformed the face of modern France. As you continue down the street, pay attention to the details above the doorways—the delicate fanlights and the rhythmic pulse of the sash windows. Every block of stone was hand-carved from the local Combe Down quarries, carrying the fossils of ancient seas into the heart of the Enlightenment.
The street leads your eye inevitably toward the Holburne Museum at the far end, which sits like a crown jewel at the terminus of this grand vista. This is the quintessence of Bath—a place where the rigid order of the eighteenth century meets the high drama of European history. Take your time as you walk.
You are treading the same path as royalty, revolutionaries, and the architects of the modern world.