In 1732, Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, made the six-day coach journey from St Albans in Hertfordshire to Scarborough in North Yorkshire to take the waters. It can’t have been the most comfortable expedition, given the state of the roads and the fact that, at the age of 72, she was suffering from gout and scurvy. Without the benefits of modern medicine, aristocratic health tourists were prepared to travel long distances to seek relief, persuaded by the Georgian physicians who extolled the curative virtues of mineral water.
After six weeks, the Duchess was happily free from scurvy, but in her letters she bemoaned the difficulty of reaching what was then called Scarborough ‘Spaw’, located as it was at the foot of steep cliffs that became inaccessible at high tide. This was to be a perennial problem, yet it also proved to be Scarborough’s unique selling point.
Fig 2 inset: A souvenir vinaigrette showing Wyatt’s 1839 Gothic Saloon.
As well as replicating the amusements of inland spas such as Harrogate and Bath, the town could offer the sea for bathing in, looking at and sailing upon. For a while, seawater was drunk as a rival tonic to the spa water. The resort culture that started at Scarborough can arguably be seen as the beginnings of the modern seaside, its progress from a place of health to one of pleasure reflected in the architectural history of the Spa itself.
Four hundred years ago, in 1626 or thereabouts, local woman Thomasin Farrer noticed a ‘russet tincture’ on stones at the base of South Cliff caused by water passing over them. Well educated and well connected, she understood the potential of the iron-rich liquid and, after tasting it, recommended it to her friends. Word spread about the spring’s healing properties.
Townspeople used the water, but so did others from further afield, especially after Dr Robert Wittie of Hull began sending his leisured patients for the cure and published the results in 1660. The first three buildings were in place by 1715, when a drawing by the York artist Francis Place shows them above a wooden staith, an early form of sea wall. One was home to the eccentric first Governor of the Spa, Dicky Dickenson, who held court as master of ceremonies.
Fig 3: Society flocked to the Spa after Paxton and Stokes built a new Music Hall and Bandstand in 1858.
The well itself, where the water was served by female attendants, was on the sands marked by a structure like a table tomb in a churchyard. After patients had received their draught, they went to one of the other two buildings, one for ladies, one for gentlemen, to wait for the medicine to take effect. The Duchess of Marlborough complained that to reach the ladies’ room required a ladder and, inside, there were only hard, narrow benches ‘which it is a punishment to sit on’.
It was not long before amenities were improved. Indeed, frequent rebuilding was a necessity, as natural forces conspired against human attempts to civilise the border between land and sea. In 1735, a bad storm destroyed the staith then, in December 1737, a landslip so astonishing it was described by contemporaries as an earthquake caused the cliff to subside on top of the Spa, complete with five cows hitherto grazing peacefully above. Fears that the spring itself had been lost proved unfounded and a letter published immediately afterwards in the London Daily Post assured potential clientele that the rediscovered spring was, in fact, superior to its predecessor (Fig 4).
That same newspaper published details of the new reception rooms in May 1738, now ‘built of Brick with a Chimney at each end, and wainscotted throughout, and the Top instead of being plaister’d is lined with Fir, to prevent any Objection on account of Damp…’
Fig 4: Georgian health seekers take their daily draught of Scarborough water in this 1813 print by Thomas Rowlandson.
By the early 19th century, the sea wall had become a solid stone structure with a promenade on top, but continuing erosion was such an expensive problem that when private enterprise proposed taking this responsibility from Scarborough Corporation they were glad to accept.
The Scarborough Cliff Bridge Company was established on November 1, 1826, to span the wide chasm that separated the town cliff from that of the Spa, finally giving access to all — or at least those able to pay its tolls. Within a year, four elegant iron arches rested on stone piers in a symbol of Scarborough’s modernity, a catwalk for the fashionable habitués of the Spa. Visiting in 1839, the roving spa reporter Dr Augustus Bozzi Granville confessed to feelings of dizziness when he stepped onto the bridge, but proclaimed himself ‘enchanted with Scarborough’.
The new Gothic Saloon at the Spa (Fig 2) was so freshly built that the interior decoration had yet to be completed. Despite this, Granville’s description of the castellated building in his The Spas of England, and Principal Sea-Bathing Places proved good for business and the promenade hall, originally not much bigger than a tennis court due to budget constraints, had to be doubled in size over the winter of 1845–46. The architect for both builds was Henry Wyatt, son of sculptor Matthew Cotes Wyatt and grandson of James Wyatt, surveyor general to George III and architect of Fonthill Abbey in Wiltshire.
Fig 5: Artist C. F. Butterick captured the spectacle of the Spa Music Hall on the night it was ablaze on September 8, 1876. Only the exterior, built in Whitby stone, survived.
Perhaps Henry was acknowledging his grandfather’s celebrity as a Gothic designer or perhaps he was referencing Scarborough Castle on the opposite side of the bay. There was certainly a good dose of the Picturesque in his Saloon with its brown, ochry walls, flat roof giving sea views and battlemented turrets with small casement windows to frame visitors’ gaze.
Already, the waters were taking a back seat to pleasure. Puritan locals protested when a band was engaged in 1837, but the impetus was impossible to resist and, in 1856, Sir Joseph Paxton was commissioned to produce an up-to-date Music Hall. Internationally famous for the Crystal Palace and inundated with work from wealthy patrons, including the Duke of Devonshire and the Rothschilds, Paxton’s employment confirmed Scarborough’s Victorian prestige. Although Paxton provided the name, however, it seems his painfully shy son-in-law George Henry Stokes carried out the design work; the Building News stated as much following the death of Stokes in 1874.
The elevations of the new Spa were defined by two floors of full-height round-headed windows with balustraded towers at each corner. Wyatt’s Saloon was converted into a refreshment hall after its now-outmoded turrets were removed. At the same time, the sea wall was extended to create a broad esplanade (Fig 3).
As the act of promenading was key to the Spa experience, a first-floor balcony ran across the front of the music hall and southward to become the roof of a shelter around Paxton’s new outdoor bandstand. The scheme was completed by a three-storey observation tower that offered views over Paxton’s Italian terrace and the newly landscaped cliffside, as well as the waves.
Fig 6: Classical and Continental, Sir Edwin Cooper’s elliptical bandstand of 1913 shelters listeners and embraces the sea view.
The Music Hall opened in July 1858, its galleried interior lit by novel ‘sun burners’ in a deeply coved ceiling of parian cement. According to the Illustrated London News, finishing touches were entrusted to royal decorator ‘Mr Crace of London’. To assist with acoustics, the walls were lined internally with wood, which caught quickly when fire broke out on September 8, 1876 (Fig 5). After three hours, only the Whitby-stone exterior survived. Having enjoyed a period of relative prosperity, as rail travel encouraged the seaside holiday habit, management took the opportunity to extend their entertainment buildings yet again.
The architectural competition was won by theatre specialists Verity and Hunt of London. Although Wyatt’s Saloon was now demolished, The Architect noted how particular attention was ‘given to preserving as far as possible the old associations of the place, and such features as the balconies and colonnade and a portion of Paxton’s hall were carefully retained’.
Nearly 30,000 tons of earth were moved and massive retaining walls built in order to extend the old music hall to the rear. The new Grand Hall could hold 3,000 people, 1,000 more than before, with an entirely new decorative scheme of grey and gold ‘in Italian Renaissance style’. Although the existing height was little changed, the building’s silhouette gained stature when the corner towers were raised and capped with domes (Fig 1).
An imposing central vestibule formed the new Spa entrance, its staircase leading south to the Grand Hall and north to a new block of similar exterior design that comprised a first-floor theatre, still very much in its original form, and ground-floor buffet, now Farrer’s Bar. There was also a reading and billiards room, conservatory and roof terrace with café. On August 2, 1880, the Lord Mayor of London arrived in his state coach to perform the official opening ceremony.
The next two Spa architects were local-born men who built national reputations. Edwin Cooper (who was later knighted) achieved fame with his Port of London Authority headquarters, whereas Frank Tugwell’s theatre expertise was employed in Harrogate, York and the West End. In 1913, Cooper brought Edwardian Classicism to the Spa, replacing Paxton’s iron bandstand with the domed elliptical structure that stands today (Fig 6). The Sheffield Daily Telegraph described the black and white marble forecourt linking it to the new café and shelter as being ‘in the Continental manner’.
Cooper’s intention of enclosing the space with glazed wings was finally realised in 1954. Tugwell’s contribution was to have been a reconstructed Grand Hall, but following demolition of Paxton’s observation tower in 1923, he was instead commissioned to replace it with a new ballroom and café, which opened in 1925.
By the post-war period, changing holiday expectations were having an impact and, with its hopes pinned on the conference trade, the town council took over Scarborough Spa in 1957. Its modernisation plans were squashed at a public inquiry in 1978, which recommended restoration of the listed Verity and Hunt buildings and adaptation of the ballroom, which assumed its concrete elevation in the 1980s.
The need for novel attractions shaped the Spa’s evolution, but what of the mineral water that started it all? Theakston’s 1840 Guide to Scarborough includes an engraving of the ‘improved’ entrance to the wells, now within the protection of the sea wall and accessed through a Gothic arch at the base of a stone stair.
This open-air arrangement, described by the Spa’s historian Meredith Whittaker as the ‘bearpit’, persisted until 1874, when a bandstand was built on top to give the pumproom a roof and musicians shelter. In 1931, the bandstand was replaced by a cubical concrete kiosk that represented the Spa’s only brush with Modernism. Anyone wishing to take the water could buy it mixed with orange juice, but consumer numbers were vanishingly small; income from the 1961–62 season was a single pound.
A trickle of the once-hyped water still comes out halfway up the steps to the beach at the north end of the Spa, providing free supply to the townspeople, a condition of the Cliff Bridge Company’s lease 200 years ago.
The pumproom itself is hidden beneath a roundabout. As part of the Scarborough 400 celebrations, there is a plan to digitally survey it, so people can see the site that launched the town’s career as the ‘Queen of Watering Places’ and the original British seaside resort.
Scarborough is celebrating its 400th year as a spa with all manner of celebrations — see more details.
This feature originally appeared in the July 15, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.