House of horror: Bath opens the world’s first museum dedicated to Mary Shelley

This week the city finally embraced its gothic past – in honour of one of its most famous residents. And with it, a host of dark secrets

“Yes there’s plenty of scope for bodies around here,” Stephen Clews, the Roman Baths & Pump Room manager chuckles. We’re surveying the Abbey Churchyard square that fronts Bath’s Pump Room and entranceway to the Roman Baths. Saxon burials were unearthed here during Pump Room excavations, and a medieval church and graveyard were flattened to make way for the square in the 18th century.

Bath’s Unesco limestone centre is a complex patchwork of historical intrigue, but what we’re actually here to look at is a plaque to the left of the Pump Room that marks where Mary Shelley lived in 1816 and 1817 and wrote most of her novel Frankenstein (first conceived by Lake Geneva). Unbeknown to Shelley, she was practically living on top of the Roman Baths, but they weren’t discovered until 60 years after she left. The living quarters she occupied were torn down in the 1890s to extend the Pump Room. Shelley’s ties to Bath were laid to rest for 200 years, but then this plaque was erected in 2018 on the bicentenary of Frankenstein’s publication after a campaign by cultural historian Christopher Frayling.