The 5 Best Art Supply Shops in Bath

June 19, 2026

Minerva Art Supplies — Green Street, Bath City Centre

The 5 Best Art Supply Shops in Bath | Discount Art Supplies

Written by Paul Worrall

I should say upfront — I’ve never actually been to Bath. Sixteen years in the art supplies industry and somehow I’ve managed to miss one of the most beautiful cities in England, which feels like a genuine oversight on reflection. But researching this guide has done nothing except make me want to fix that as soon as possible. Georgian terraces the colour of honey, Roman baths still doing more or less what they did two thousand years ago, a creative scene that’s apparently been quietly excellent for decades without shouting about it. Bath looks like the kind of place that makes you want to paint it just by standing in it.

I’m Paul Worrall. I spent nearly a decade running digital marketing for ARTdiscount, one of the UK’s largest online art retailers, and I now run Discount Art Supplies — a price comparison platform used by over 36,000 UK artists every week. So while I can’t tell you which café does the best view of the Abbey, I can tell you with real confidence what Bath offers anyone who wants to actually buy art supplies while they’re there. If you’re planning visits to nearby cities, also check out our guides to the best art supply shops in Bristol and the best art supply shops in Cambridge.

1. Minerva Art Supplies — Green Street, Bath City Centre

Minerva is the kind of shop that makes a city’s art supply offering genuinley special, and it’s not hard to see why it tops every list of where to buy materials in Bath. The history alone is extraordinary — tracing back to 1821 when the building first opened as J. Sculthorpe Restorers, Carvers and Gilders, with the modern Minerva formed in 2015 when two long-standing local shops, F.J. Harris & Son and Minerva Graphics, merged together. That’s two centuries of continous art retail on the same patch of Bath, which is the kind of thing you simply can’t manufacture or fake.

The range covers paints, brushes, papers, technical pens, graphic markers, moulding materials and folios — comprehensive enough that serious artists and students alike treat it as their first stop. What comes through repeatedly in reviews is the staff — every single one a practising artist themselves, which means the advice you get is the genuine article rather than someone reading off a product label. For a city with the creative pedigree of Bath, having a shop this knowledgeable and this established feels entirely appropriate.

Located at 13 Green Street in the heart of the city — close enough to the main shopping streets that it’s an easy stop whatever else you’re doing in Bath that day. Visit Minerva Art Supplies online →

2. Hobbycraft Bath — Mero Retail Park

The honest version of Hobbycraft, as I tend to give in every city guide I write: not specialist, not the place for professional-grade materials, but genuinely useful for what it is. Hobbycraft Bath at Mero Retail Park covers the full range — acrylics, watercolours, canvases, sketchbooks, craft kits, kids’ supplies and seasonal materials — at prices that make experimenting and stocking up painless rather than precious.

What I find consistently interesting about Hobbycraft’s larger stores is the workshop programme — Bath’s branch runs regular in-store sessions through ClassBento covering specific crafts, led by colleagues from the Hobbycraft Artisan programme. For anyone wanting to learn a new skill alongside picking up supplies, that combination is genuinely valuable and not something every art shop in a city offers.

For parents, teachers, beginners and anyone restocking the basics without ceremony, Hobbycraft Bath does the job reliably. Check our Hobbycraft discount code guide before visiting — the student and Blue Light Card discounts are worth knowing about.

Find Hobbycraft Bath →

3. Bath Aqua Glass — Kingsdown

Bath Aqua Glass glassblowing studio Bath

This is the entry in this guide that genuinely surprised me while researching it, and the kind of discovery that makes writing these guides worthwhile even when I haven’t visited the city myself. Bath Aqua Glass is an independent glassblowing studio founded in 1996, famous for a signature blue-green “Aqua” glass inspired directly by the Roman glass discovered in the thermal springs that gave Bath its name in the first place. There’s something properly poetic about a craft business built around the specific colour of water that’s been running through the same city for two thousand years.

For two decades the studio operated as part of Walcot Street’s “Artisan Quarter” — apparently quite the local institution, with founder Adrian Dolan affectionately known around Bath as “Mr Walcot” for his tireless promotion of independent craft businesses in the area. The studio consolidated to its Kingsdown base in November 2025, where the glassblowing demonstrations and the full range of Roman and Georgian-style glassware, stained glass and memorial pieces continue. Founder Annette Dolan is dyslexic and has written about it to encourage others into craft-based business — the kind of personal story that adds real depth to what could otherwise just be a nice gift shop.

Not a conventional art supplies stop, but for anyone with even a passing interest in glass as a creative medium, or anyone who simply wants to watch a genuinely skilled craftsperson at work, this is exactly the kind of independent business that makes a city’s creative scene worth exploring properly. Visit Bath Aqua Glass online →

4. Beaux Arts Bath — Near Bath Abbey

Beaux Arts Bath contemporary art gallery

Bath’s longest-established and most renowned contemporary art gallery, sitting right next to the Abbey and acting as the sister gallery to Beaux Arts London. The gallery specialises in major twentieth-century painters, sculptors and studio ceramicists, and from everything I’ve read it carries genuine weight in the UK contemporary art world rather than being a tourist-facing gallery that happens to be well located.

This isn’t a supplies shop and I’m including it for the same reason I include galleries in every city guide — a creative city’s identity isn’t just measured by where you buy paint, it’s measured by what’s on the walls once you’ve used it. For Bath, with its Georgian grandeur and its genuinely deep artistic history, having a gallery of this calibre right at the centre of things feels appropriate rather than incidental.

Located beside Bath Abbey in the heart of the city centre. Worth building into any art-focused day out in Bath, supplies trip or not.

5. The Artisan Quarter — Walcot Street and London Road

Walcot Street Artisan Quarter Bath independent shops

Rather than a single shop, my fifth recommendation is an area — and from the research I’ve done it sounds like exactly the kind of place I’d want to spend a slow afternoon if I ever make it to Bath. London Road and Walcot Street have been known as Bath’s Artisan Quarter since the 1960s, and the description that kept coming up was a concentration of independent shops that’s increasingly rare on UK high streets. Meticulous Ink offers letterpress printing, bespoke stationary and calligraphy supplies. Always Sunday House is a curated emporium of gifts, trinkets and art. Bartlett Street Antiques Centre has fine art and Asian art alongside its broader antiques range.

What strikes me most about the Artisan Quarter, even just reading about it, is that it represents the opposite of what’s happened to so many UK high streets — a cluster of genuinely independent, specialist businesses that have survived and apparently thrived together rather than been replaced by chains. For artists who want materials with a story, or who simply want to spend a morning somewhere that feels properly creative rather than purely transactional, this sounds like the place.

A Note on Bath — From Someone Who Hasn’t Been Yet

Writing this guide without having visited Bath myself has been an unusual experience, and I want to be honest about that rather than pretend otherwise. What’s clear even from a distance is that Bath’s art and craft scene runs deeper than a quick list of shops can properly capture — a 200-year-old art supplies business still trading on the same street, a glassblowing studio inspired by the exact mineral content of the water beneath the city, a contemporary gallery with genuine national standing, and an entire quarter of the city built around independent makers. That’s not a thin creative scene propped up by tourism. That’s a city that’s been quietly serious about art and craft for a very long time.

I’ll get to Bath eventually — probably with Lucy, who’d appreciate Minerva more than most places we could visit, and the kids would no doubt find the Roman Baths more interesting than any art shop regardless of what I tell them. Until then, this guide is the most honest version I can give you from sixteen years of knowing this industry without yet knowing this particular city.

For the best current UK prices on materials before or after any Bath art shop visit, Discount Art Supplies compares prices in real time across all major retailers.