The Royal Pump Rooms and the Development of the Spa Town
Bath Street in Leamington's Old Town, around 1820.
Growth of the spa town
The town of Leamington Spa, originally known as Leamington Priors, was until about 1800 only a small village on the south bank of the river Leam. The mineral springs were known in the Middle Ages, but it was not until 1784 that inhabitants of the village began re-discovering its saline springs, using them to attract visitors wishing to improve their health by ‘taking the waters’. Soon, a number of the springs had bath houses built around them.
Lord Aylesford's Well (the 'Old Well') and All Saints' parish church, about 1815.
Beginning in 1808, the expanding spa spread from the 'Old Town' to the north bank of the Leam, where a 'New Town' was laid out. To succeed, this needed its own bath house. Attempts to discover a reliable source of saline water in the higher land in the heart of the New Town were unsuccessful, but in 1810 a spring was discovered on land immediately north of the river. This became the site for the building now known as the Royal Pump Rooms.
The Royal Pump Rooms in 1816. The cattle by the river Leam are on meadowland which was later laid out as Jephson Gardens.
The Royal Pump Rooms
Designed by C S Smith of Warwick and built for a consortium of local businessmen at a reputed cost of £25,000, it was officially opened in July 1814. The Spa treatment was claimed to cure, or relieve, a huge number of disorders - examples being 'stiffness of the tendons', 'rigidity of the joints', 'the effects of gout and rheumatism and various paralytic conditions'. The spa water is also a mild laxative!
The Pump Room Gardens were originally laid out and enclosed for the exclusive use of the patrons of the Pump Room 'to afford them pleasant promenades'. A bandstand was erected and military bands played in the evening during the summer for patrons. It was not until 1875 that the Pump Room Gardens became public.
Patrons in front of the Royal Pump Rooms in the 1840s. At this time the building stood in its own private grounds.
The 'Royal Pump Room and Baths' paid handsome profits in their early days but by 1848 the fashion for 'taking the waters' at inland spas had begun to decline. In 1860 the Hon Charles Bertie Percy, by then the sole owner, put the building up for sale. A newly formed company took it over and in 1862 - 63 carried out extensive reconstruction work, including the addition of a tower and pediment on the facade, and building an extension for a Turkish Bath and swimming pool. In 1889, now owned by the local authority, a larger pool was added which remained the town's public swimming pool until 1989.
Physiotherapy and hydrotherapy treatments were available at the Royal Pump Rooms until 1994, but by this time the problems of redeveloping the building looked almost insurmountable. Then in the mid-1990s the owners of the building, Warwick District Council, in collaboration with Warwickshire County Council, produced proposals to relocate Leamington's Art Gallery & Museum, Library and Tourist Information Centre to the Royal Pump Rooms. The building’s existing Assembly Rooms were to be refurbished and new Tea Rooms created, so forming a major cultural and tourist attraction. The scheme was carried out 1997 - 99 and the redeveloped building opened to the public in summer 1999, safeguarding the future of the Royal Pump Rooms for the 21st century.
Leamington's Cultural Quarter
Since the mid-1990s Warwick District Council has had a long term strategy to create a 'Cultural Quarter' in south Leamington. This includes existing and planned facilities for the arts, heritage and leisure, which together will help regenerate the ‘Old Town’. In 2006 this took a major step forward with the opening of new arts facilities in converted historic buildings at the back of Spencer Street Church.
Find out more...
The story of the building and its part in the development of Royal Leamington Spa is presented in the Art Gallery & Museum. It is also told in a well illustrated booklet: The Royal Pump Rooms and the growth of Leamington Spa, available at the Royal Pump Rooms (£2.50).
Leamington's spectacular development in the 19th and 20th centuries from an agricultural village into a spa resort, then into a thriving modern town, is presented through historic photographs and prints in a book by Jeff Watkin, Royal Leamington Spa Revisited, Tempus Publishing Ltd, Stroud, 2008 (£12.99).
For further details about the redevelopment of the Royal Pump Rooms 1997 - 99 visit Royal Pump Rooms Project.
Find out more about the Cultural Quarter.
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