Cotham /ˈkɒtəm/ is an area of Bristol, England, about one mile (1.5 kilometres) north of the city centre.

Cotham is characterised by its individually developed urban streets, dominated by a high-quality victorian townscape, in conjunction with its spacious, leafy character as a product of the individual gardens and areas of public landscape, both larger than average for an inner city suburb, generally handed down from earlier estate layouts of parklands.

[2] Over-arching these two elements is a dramatic local topography, which contributes greatly to the quantity and quality of views and panoramas.

[2] The hilly topography gives emphasis to roofs, bay windows and chimneys emphasising the scale and substance of victorian villa construction.

[2]It is a cosmopolitan residential area with large old houses, many of which are used as hotels and bed and breakfast accommodation, or divided into flats, and a selection of small independent shops.

[4] The top of Saint Michael's Hill in Cotham was one of the historical city limits of Bristol, and the traditional location for hangings.

[6] The gallows form one quarter of the badge of the local Rugby club, Cotham Park RFC.

Cotham Church was built in 1842–1843 by William Butterfield in a Gothic Revival style, as Highbury Congregational Chapel.

The College was designed by the Bristol architect, Henry Dare Bryan, in the Arts and Crafts style and is a Grade II listed building.

[13] The University of Bristol Student Health Service is a separate general practice located at Hampton House Health Centre, opposite Western College, providing primary care service to students of university their families with over 6,000 registrations a year.

As homeopathy services developed and expanded over time, its popularity required the building of a specialist hospital.

The commission was a gift to the city in remembrance of his son, killed in action in 1915 in the First World War.

The Wills family owned a successful Bristol tobacco company and bequeathed the city a number of prominent buildings.

[16][9] All cause premature mortality (defined as the directly age standardised rates of people dying of all causes before the age of 75 years) was 228.6 premature deaths per 100,000 population for Cotham ward, significantly better than the Bristol average of 381.2 people per 100,000 population.

Cotham School, through its former evolutions, has educated two Nobel Laureates, Paul Dirac (graduated 1918) and Peter Higgs (1946).

Among other discoveries, he formulated the Dirac equation which describes the behaviour of fermions and predicted the existence of antimatter.

Dirac shared the 1933 Nobel Prize in Physics with Erwin Schrödinger "for the discovery of new productive forms of atomic theory".