Neglected Forebears & Lost Swagger Spas
The Gainsborough, Part II
In this month’s Musing, architectural historian Dr. Moira Rudolf continues her earlier thoughts on the secret history of The Gainsborough Hotel, and reinforces its position in Bath’s Thermal Corridor by putting it into context via a neglected Forebear and two later – but lost – Swagger Spas
In my January Musing, I referred to The Royal Mineral Water Hospital (opened 1742 as the Bath General Hospital and known locally as ‘The Min’), a prestigious and subsequently greatly-extended establishment (an attic storey was added 1793 and an additional building in 1860). It was a lifeline for the chronically ill and disabled who flocked to Bath in search of the healing properties of the naturally-occurring hot mineral water. As with the United Hospital, now today’s Gainsborough Hotel, it used Bath’s thermal springs medicinally with water piped direct to both establishments from 1830.
By 1935, The Min was renowned as a specialist centre for rheumatic and skin disorders for which it offered numerous novel treatments and – to the best of my recollection – continued to use the spa waters until around 1978, when a health scare (quickly resolved) interrupted this. In 2018, the buildings were sold and, the following year, The Min – and its treasures – moved to new premises at Bath’s Royal United Hospital (RUH), Combe Park; just outside the city. Today its former home lies empty, neglected and semi-derelict, although planning permission for redevelopment as a hotel was granted in 2021.
Let us hope that some chic concern soon comes to rescue it from its current ignominious state. It – like The Gainsborough – still retains reminders of its Roman past: a mosaic from a Roman villa which remains in situ in the basement, not far from the one immediately below The Gainsborough’s Spa Village, which has been exactly replicated above for all Spa Visitors to see.
The Grand Pump Room Hotel once proudly – and sensationally – stood on the site of today’s anodyne 1960s Arlington House, bordering Stall Street, Bath Street and Cheap Street, which had earlier housed the sixteenth-century White Hart Inn, Bath’s oldest and foremost coaching inn. It was referred to by Jane Austen in both Northanger Abbey and Persuasion and was later immortalised by Charles Dickens in The Pickwick Papers when Sam Weller attempts to introduce the fictional Mr Pickwick to the real-life landlord one.
There were numerous architectural firms vying for the design of this important facility, intended as it was to reinvigorate Bath’s fortunes as leisure and a spa destination. Matters were ultimately decided by an anonymous competition. Although won by the City Surveyor, Major Charles Edward Davis, the commission went to the runners-up, Wilson & Willcox to avoid any suggestion of a conflict of interest. Work began in 1866 and the building was completed in 1869.
Major Davis, in addition to his city and private architectural duties, went on from c1878 -1895 to rediscover and excavate The Roman Baths; a complex, impressive undertaking. His last great masterwork, just before his death in 1902, was The Empire Hotel (1899-1901). Nikolaus Pevsner’s architectural guide described the hotel as ‘an unbelievably pompous building,’ which is unsurprising since Davis – apparently arrogant, stubborn and confrontational – had already announced his intention to erect a building which would out-rival Bath Abbey in size and magnificence. (If you are in doubt, please go to the south end of Orange Grove and stand with your back to Grand Parade and you will see what I mean…)
Wilson & Willcox’s Grand Pump Room Hotel was similarly, unashamedly swagger and its facilities – coffee and tea rooms, a drawing room, massive restaurant and billiard room – second to none. It was built in the ‘French Renaissance/Loire Château’ manner, a popular style for fashionable new hotels, many of which sported the signature broken skyline bristling with mansard roofs, dormer windows and tall crowning finials. The Grand Pump Room was invisibly (but crucially, since guests wouldn’t have to venture outside) linked via concealed doorways, long gentle ramps and an electric lift to the same architect’s contemporary (1867) New Royal Baths which boasted a mineral water swimming pool measuring an impressive 50ft long x 27ft wide. Its marbled lobbies, elegant palms and expensive fixtures and fittings would have screamed quality and luxury to Bath’s middle and upper class visitors. The L-shaped façade and entrance steps were guarded by two stone lions which now live in the Somerset Place grounds of Bath Spa University’s Sion Hill Campus.
The fate of The Grand Pump Room Hotel was, alas, sealed during World War II when it was requisitioned by The Admiralty, recently decamped from London. After the war, the council attempted to revive the dying spa, but to no avail and in 1959 it was demolished and – shamefully in my opinion – replaced with the faceless Arlington House thus destroying one of Stall Street’s finest buildings. The pre-demolition photographs show echoing, deserted, magnificent halls and rooms, bringing to mind the atmospheric, intriguing Alain Robbe-Grillet/Alain Resnais 1961 ciné-novel Last Year at Marienbad, filmed at an apparently deserted Germanic Spa.
Major Davis, though, could never be idle; during the excavation of the Roman Baths, he was under pressure from the City Corporation to eventually create a new suite of state-of-the-art baths. He had already upgraded Wilson & Willcox’s New Royal Baths in 1883 and, in 1885, made a tour of continental spas and their latest treatments with a medical colleague, Dr Freeman. The experience consolidated his knowledge of spas and led to him drafting ideas for future improbable buildings.
The immediate result was his splendid 1889 Douche and Massage Baths (also, confusingly, known as The New Queen’s Baths) which opened on the site of today’s convincingly-Georgian Thomas Baldwin-style building. Constructed between 1971-72, it houses the Roman Baths Gift Shop and offices, with the Roman Circular Bath since revealed below. As well as offering a vast array of novel, unfamiliar and quirky treatments, Major Davis’s baths offered an Aix-les-Bains massage bath, a Bertholet vapour bath and an invigorating needle shower, all contained in luxuriously appointed, attractively tiled rooms, with immersion access to the health-giving waters and five reclining baths in the basement, all – as Doc Watson put it in his book EXPOSED: The Major and the Roman Baths (ELSP 2017) – ‘intermingling with Roman remains,’ ‘intermingling with Roman remains.’
Today the – to many – confusing inscription ‘King’s & Queen’s Baths’ remains above the Pump Room’s Stall Street entrance. During his excavations, Major Davis demolished the Queen’s Bath over the Roman Circular Bath allowing him to construct his new spa directly above; after all, he hadn’t taken anything away. At the same time, he cut back the floor of the King’s Bath immediately behind the Pump Room to reveal the Roman Sacred Spring. Both of these can be easily seen during a tour of the Roman Baths today.
All that remains of Major Davis’s luxurious baths now is the curtain wall fronting York Street and backing onto the Sacred Spring with its whimsical (and, I think, rather silly) array of animal heads, overblown vases and the moving plaque announcing his astonishing discoveries on which the final words are: ‘Here their magnificence is disclosed’. Still, his spa-associated Empire Hotel lives on, with chic retirement residential accommodation above and below – if you know where to look – the glories and intriguing history of the original entrance and swagger public and private dining rooms stretching out before you.
