Wood also designed important buildings outside Bath, including the reconstruction of Llandaff Cathedral, Buckland House, The Exchange, Bristol, and Liverpool Town Hall.

During his teenage years and early twenties, Wood worked for Robert Benson, the first Baron Bingley at his estate, Bramham Park, Yorkshire.

[3][4][5] Through reading, site visits and practical experience Wood developed his unique ideas in order to create a master plan for his home town of such ambition it is almost overwhelming.

Instead he approached Robert Gay, a barber surgeon from London, and the owner of the Barton Farm estate in the Manor of Walcot, outside the city walls.

Wood created one of the greatest attractions in the world, recognised by UNESCO for embodying a number of outstanding universal values — including the deliberate creation of a beautiful and unified city.

Ultimately this meant less work and risk for Wood; in addition he received £305 per annum in rents, leaving him a healthy profit of £168 – the equivalent today (in terms of average earnings) of £306,000.

In 1716 the architect William Killigrew was commissioned to rebuild the St John's Hospital, which had been founded around 1180, by Bishop Reginald Fitz Jocelin making it among the oldest almshouses in England.

[11] The building for the Royal National Hospital for Rheumatic Diseases was designed by Wood and built with Bath Stone donated by Ralph Allen.

His final masterpiece was the Circus,[25] built on Barton Fields outside the old city walls of Bath, although he never lived to see his plans put into effect as he died less than three months after the first stone was laid.

Wood also designed important buildings outside Bath, the reconstruction of Llandaff Cathedral[26] 1734–1749, The Exchange, Bristol[26] 1741–43, Liverpool Town Hall[27] 1749–54.

[1] The ground floor had a central courtyard surrounded by Doric colonnades but it was "dark and confined, and the merchants preferred to transact business in the street outside".

Sir Robert Throckmorton, the fourth baronet of Coughton,[30] who commissioned Wood to design the new Buckland House[31] as a shooting lodge and weekend retreat.

[39] Many of the buildings he designed are littered with icons and symbols associated with Freemasonry, leading many people who have studied his work to believe that he was a member of the organisation, even though there is no documentary proof.

Wood wrote extensively about sacred geometry, and argued that the myths of the supposed founder of Bath, King Bladud, were based on truth.

In his Masonic lecture and article, Stephen Ben Cox tentatively suggests an image for this as the square (Queen's Square), the circle (The Circus) and the crescent (The Royal Crescent): standing for Earth, Sun and Moon, and following the masonic path of the sun in the Lodge from east (the Master chair) to south (the Junior Warden) and exiting in the west (the Senior Warden) as a symbol of man's spiritual progress in life from the rough to the smooth ashlar.

[40] When viewed from the air, the Circus, along with Queens Square and the adjoining Gay Street, form a key shape, which is a masonic symbol similar to those that adorn many of Wood's buildings.

[41] Cox notes that there is no direct evidence of deliberate Masonic expression in the architecture (although there are plenty of carved signs and symbols which are important to Freemasonry).

Wood repeats and embellishes earlier stories that Bladud founded the city because while he was in Athens he contracted leprosy, and when he returned home he was imprisoned as a result, but escaped and went far off to go into hiding.

He found employment as a swineherd at Swainswick, about two miles from the later site of Bath, and noticed that his pigs would go into an alder-moor in cold weather and return covered in black mud.

[43] Like Inigo Jones before him, who had also surveyed Stonehenge, Wood's study of these two monuments had an important influence on his work in providing key dimensions for the Circus in Bath and confirming his interest in the local antiquity of circular and crescent forms.

[45] Many of his building projects were continued by his son John Wood, the Younger, including the Royal Crescent, Bath Assembly Rooms[46] and Buckland House.