The Circus in Bath is one of Georgian England's great architectural puzzles. Designed by John Wood the Elder and completed in the 1760s, it consists of 33 townhouses arranged in a perfect circle, their facades decorated with 525 carved stone reliefs. Three classical column types, Doric, Ionic and Corinthian, are stacked one above the other, an arrangement borrowed from the Colosseum in Rome. Some of the carvings remain unexplained to this day.

What makes the Circus genuinely strange is the theory lurking behind its design. Wood was a Freemason, and some historians believe the Circus, Brock Street and the Royal Crescent were laid out to form the shape of a key. A key to what, nobody knows.

VoiceMap's self-guided audio tours walk you through this riddle in detail, tracing Wood's Freemasonic influences, decoding the symbolic carvings and connecting the Circus to the wider Georgian ambition to reimagine Bath as a second Rome.