Welcome to Bath Historical Directories

Starting with Silverthorn's 1846 'Bath Directory', followed by 'A Directory for the City and Borough of Bath and Its Environs' by Samuel Vivian, then a virtually complete run of the Post Office Bath Directories from 1858 to 1937 have been scanned by Archive CD Books and are now being made available in a fully searchable form on this website by members of the History of Bath Research Group. Initially a minimum of one directory from each decade has been completed and as further issues are made available they will be added to the database. This is being done to provide a research tool for those who wish to explore the people, places and occupations of Bath's people from 1846 to 1937.
In February 2020 this list was added to by the early directories, 1791, 1805, 1809, 1819 and 1833, thanks to the dedicated work of Anne Buchanan, Local Studies Librarian at the Bath Record Office and a team of volunteers.
Note: We have only digitised the General Directory section of each directory, however, most of the other sections are simple rearrangements of this data - e.g. the Street Directory shows the same data in street order, the Professional Directory by profession. There are areas of the directories that we have not attempted to digitise, the many, and often beautiful advertisements, tables of stamp duties, chairman's fares (chairmen carried people around the city), etc. The smallest and earliest directory, from 1791, runs to 1,260 entries, the Post Office Directories in the 1930s to more than 26,000, if you wish to view these in their entirety then a visit to the Bath Record Office or purchasing directories from Archive CD Books is the only way.
We believe that it is important that we should make the Bath Directories available to all researchers in a digitised format and online.
Through online searches researchers need not have physical contact with the original directories saving time for the researcher and preserving the original documents held by the Bath Record Office and ourselves. Digitisation can offer a range of search tools that speed up research. Basic search tools have been provided and further tools are being developed to make searches much more comprehensive.
The printed directories have been scanned and these scans have been further processed by both automatic and manual reviews. The manual reviews have been undertaken by people with local knowledge of the area and also an interest in historical research to produce a digital record with a high degree of accuracy.

Note On Data Authenticity
  • In order to maintain the authenticity of this rendition of the directories, we cannot change the wording of the online entries if this results in them differing from the original publication*.
  • Before reporting an error please check the pdf original and if you think it differs from what is shown on the web page please let us know so that we can make any suitable corrections.
  • Each set of results shows a Report Error button to the right of each entry. If you spot an error please click this button and fill in the form to let us know of the issue.
*N.B. In a very few cases the original has obvious typographical errors which have been corrected to ensure that the data is valid and searchable.
Note On The Software Used To Create These Online Historical Directories
Specialist database software has been written to enable both the speedy and accurate digital recording of this data. The pdf images created by Archive CD Books are first processed by commercial available OCR software to create text based versions of each directory page. Software written specifically for this purpose is then used to input the text documents into a Microsoft Access database under the supervision of members of the history group who correct any errors. The final stage involved the design of this website to present the data in a form that may be used by those researching Bath's past.
The specialist software, Access database and website were designed by one of our committee members, Richard Williams. If you are interested in the work behind the creation of this resource or you wish to know how you may do similar work for your own town or city please contact Richard through this link.
*Archive CD Books have made a number of the directories available for purchase on CD and also for download. Currently they only appear to be available through a Facebook page Archive CD Books