The Royal Crescent was built between 1767 and 1775 to the design of John Wood the Younger, and forms a semi-ellipse of thirty Grade I listed houses arranged around a great Lawn. The famous travel writer Jan Morris once wrote about it, "It lies there in a shallow arc, its wide Lawns running away beyond the Ha-ha down the hill below, and all is suddenly space, and green, and leisure. The Crescent is architecture on a truly palatial scale and reminds many people of Versailles". (Introduction to Bath: An Architectural Guide, by Charles Robertson, 1975). Well-known architectural writer Nikolas Pevsner wrote, “the conception of an open composition was something new in town-planning, and something very English, although the idea came perhaps from Prior Park, that is the villas of Palladio. It was here applied for the first time to a terrace of houses, and moreover the shape of the Crescent was here employed for the first time.” North Somerset and Bristol, Buildings of England series, 1958).