Bath time and beyond!
What makes the quintessential English spa town? Healing treatments, Roman roots and Georgian glamour – and it’s not just the West Country’s grand dame that delivers, says Sophie Campbell
When did taking the waters become a thing in chilly Britain? It’s easy to see why the first real evidence of bathing in or drinking from our natural mineral springs comes from the Romans – they came from a bathing culture, were several degrees of latitude out of their comfort zone and were tough, military men. They valued mineral salts for aching muscles and skin problems and must have relished warm water. The word “spa”, used centuries later, comes from the Latin “sanum per aqua” or “health through water”, and the Romans borrowed the word “thermae” from the Greeks.
In most cases they were using sites well known to Celtic people before them, and after they left Britain in AD 400 Britons continued to respect mineral springs, setting up shrines to pagan gods and goddesses. These were repurposed by the Christian church into a pantheon of saints with special powers: St Ann, who pops up in Malvern and Nottingham as well as Buxton, was the mother of Mary and patron of motherhood.
In the city of Bath, the Romans’ great complex literally collapsed a century or so after their departure. It was not until 1705, when the Pump Room was built and better roads and carriages facilitated an annual dash from London and elsewhere that the waters entered the wider consciousness. From then on, Bath set the standard in amusing and housing the stylish blow-ins who doubled (at least) its population from May to September.
You needed: a Pump Room, in which to meet and pretend you were there for the waters; Assembly Rooms, for flirting, dancing and getting noticed; rules of propriety, to stop things getting out of hand; and some way of knowing who was there and where, hence signing in on arrival with name and lodgings. Got all of those? Let the fun begin!
We benefit from all this today, as we enjoy the charms of our great spa towns: Tunbridge Wells (spring discovered 1606), say, with its elegant Georgian colonnade the Pantiles; or Cheltenham (spring discovered 1716), all wide streets and creamy stucco beneath the Cotswold escarpment. Thanks to the Victorians, who embraced inland spas from Leamington to Harrogate with gusto, we enjoy all the extras that came with “the fashion”: winter gardens, theatres, parks and museums.