Should I have a bath or a shower?

The honest answer is that most people use the shower every day and the bath a handful of times a year, and yet removing the bath from the only bathroom in the house is still a decision people regret.

The practical questions are: is this the only bathroom, are there small children now or plausibly later, and are you likely to sell within a few years. Two of three pointing at "keep a bath" usually settles it.

It's a live question in Macclesfield's older terraces in particular, because a great many of them have exactly one bathroom and not much room in it — the bathroom having been carved out of a bedroom, or built onto the back, long after the house went up. That's precisely the situation where taking the bath out buys you a lovely shower room and costs you the only bath in the house. Think about it before the suite is ordered rather than after.

The middle path, a shower over the bath, is a compromise that satisfies nobody perfectly but works — the screen and a decent thermostatic mixer make far more difference to daily life than the bath underneath does.

If you do go shower-only, spend the money on the shower itself and on the waterproofing behind it. That's what determines whether the room is a pleasure to use, and whether it's still watertight in ten years.