As you’ve soaked your weary body in a luxuriously warm and bubbly bath have you ever found yourself wondering just how the modern bathroom came about? No? Well, we’re going to tell you anyway.

Mankind’s relationship with bathroom cleanliness dates back as far as 3000 BC when bathing was a religious necessity to ensure purity before entering holy places. However the first known bathtub can be traced to the Palace of Knossos in Crete at around 1700 BC, which bore a remarkable resemblance to many of the baths of today, both in looks and in the kind of plumbing works that surrounded it.

The Greek cities of Pylos and Tiryns had bathrooms with water supply and drainage systems, and later Greek vase paintings indicate that the Greeks even used showers.

Of course, everyone knows that it was those inventive Romans who really turned bathing into an art form. As early as the 3rd century BC, elaborate baths were being included in the villas and townhouses of wealthy Romans. With separate rooms for damp and dry heat and warm and cold baths, the buildings were heated with hypocausts, furnaces with flues extending through the floors and walls of the building.

Being a less fastidious race of people, Britain’s first bathroom is recorded in the mid 17th century and was recently unearthed in a long-abandoned outbuilding at Bolsover in Derbyshire, where Sir William Cavendish pioneered the new fashion for “bathing rooms” after the English civil war. Well, those Middle Ages were a long and grubby affair and everyone simply needed a good wash and a scrub!

But a history of the bathroom wouldn’t be complete without paying homage to the one man widely regarded as the father of the modern WC. In fact his very name has become synonymous with the toilet itself. We are, you’ll have guessed, talking about Thomas Crapper. Born in Yorkshire in 1836, into a family of modest means he went on to become a highly exalted plumber in London before patenting his revolutionary flushing water closet.

But it’s funny to think that the bathroom, as we know it today, has been commonplace in our homes for a lot less than 100 years. Before this, baths were unwieldy metal-lined wooden affairs that were brought into the kitchen for the weekly bathing event and filled with hot water from the stove to be shared by everyone. John M. Kohler, founder of the Kohler Co, and originally a manufacturer of cast-iron farm implements, saw an opportunity to sell to a new market. He modified a horse trough by enamelling it and adding legs, then sold it as a bath to meet the growing demand for bathroom fixtures around the turn of the century.

As plumbing techniques improved and modern bathroom suites were manufactured on a mass scale, bathrooms were made into self-contained areas and bathing became an increasingly private affair, far removed from the communal behaviour of the ancient civilisations

There, just a few fascinating facts to ponder next time you take a bath on your own - or with all your Roman friends!