[2][3] It moved from the Guildhall Technical College[4] to its present site at Beechen Cliff in 1932 when it was renamed the City of Bath Boys' School.

On 7 August 1988, on a school climbing expedition in the Briançon region of the French Alps, the 57-year-old headmaster Donald Stephens fell 300 feet (91 m) to his death.

Fifteen pupils and three members of staff were on the expedition, training for a walk up Mount Kenya, and witnessed the tragic incident.

A review of Bath secondary provision by Avon County Council in the 1980s proposed that the school be closed and replaced with a sixth form college on the same site serving the whole city.

In February 1990 Avon County Council took the Secretary of State for Education and Science, John MacGregor, to the High Court to prevent the school gaining GM status and thus fatally undermining its Bath schools reorganisation plan; on 24 February Mr Justice Hutchison ruled in favour of the council, obliging the Secretary of State to reconsider his decision.

[6] At a further judicial review hearing by the High Court on 15 May, Lord Justice Mustill upheld the Minister's decision.

Former pupil and winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of the mechanism of gene-splicing, Richard J. Roberts, donated a substantial part of his prize money to help the school build a new science centre, called the Richard Roberts Science Centre.

[10] In July 2018 the school was severely criticised following an unannounced Ofsted inspection, which downgraded its rating for overall effectiveness from outstanding to inadequate.

[18][19] In the early 1930s the main building was built on the site of Lyncombe Hill Farm to enable the move from the Guildhall.