Adventures on the High Teas

by Stuart Maconie

  The ices – to use the proper 1950s idiom – at the Henley Ice Cream Company are more famous and nearly as good. It’s an attractive old timber-frame building housing a company established in 1934, and a much-loved and famed Sunday afternoon destination for West Midlanders for three generations. It’s a tea room and gift shop now, with contented patrons slurping at their lemon meringue and strawberry double cones underneath a cheery logo of a cow jumping over the moon. As the nice ladies there will tell you – and if for some reason they won’t, framed newspaper clippings on the wall tell the tale – the current owners took the company over eight years ago to stop this local institution falling into the rapacious hands of developers who care only for high-yields and buy-to-lets, and naught for cinder toffee ice cream ‘with everything on it’. The various, bewildering flavours – all forty-one of them – are now made on farms in Staffordshire and Worcestershire.

  Pleasant though Henley is, I’m only passing through on my way to one of England’s most famous spa towns, and, for several years running at the turn of the twenty-first century, the most prosperous town in England. Royal Leamington Spa was a beacon and flagship of Central England’s revival after the slump of its automotive industries, and thanks to improved rail links, the building of the M40 and the boom in communications technology. Leamington can make a good claim to be definitively Middle English, not just culturally but statistically. A 900-year-old tree called the Midland Oak, at Lillington, just northeast of the town centre, has a plaque claiming that it is the very centre of the country. At the time of going to press it is not known whether irate Meridens have uprooted it and borne it, Elgin Marbles and Stone of Scone-like, to a safe house. If you want more proof of its centrality, Leamington Spa is, according to recent socio-linguistic research, right on the very border of the north/south divide over the pronunciation of Bath, the ‘a’ being short as in ‘bat’ north of here and all languid and long as in ‘bar’ once you get south.

  Geographically, Middle England led the country out of Major and Lamont’s recession and right through Blair and Brown’s fiscal prudence and into financial cosiness, for a while at least. Significantly, during the 2001 election, Tony Blair and his entourage made a beeline for Leamington, bringing chicken ciabattas, fizzy water and lollipops and crisps for the kiddies; this just before plump kids became the nation’s bogeyman and we feared the coming of the twelve-stone toddler as we once feared nuclear attack. Blair’s was a carefully choreographed visit to a scientifically selected target constituency in which, according to the Independent, ‘Mr Blair mingled, for the benefit of the cameras, in the lavish tea room of the refurbished Royal Pump House and Baths … Even the sun came out briefly to provide perfect lighting through the Georgian windows. The town’s tea drinkers, supposedly a cross-section of residents, sounded suspiciously at times like they were reciting from a New Labour handbook. After the self-employed Kevin Finnan extolled the need to invest in public services, Mr Blair admitted with a self-conscious smile: “I couldn’t have put it better myself.”’

  If Tony is here today I can’t see him. He’s certainly not enjoying a doner in the branch of Kebabish by the grand 1930s railway station. On arrival, Royal Leamington Spa (to give it its Sunday name), or Leamington if you prefer, or even ‘Leam’ as the racier locals have it, feels similar to the Yorkshire spa of Harrogate: knocked about a bit and suffering from some 1970s planning blight but still suffused with a certain old-world elegance to be felt along its Georgian crescents, in its grand hotels and amongst its abundant statuary, if not its pizza parlours and martial arts studios. In fact, idling by the river and wandering around the lovely Jephson Gardens, it feels distinctly superior to Harrogate, although of course that could be the embittered and begrudging Lancastrian in me.

  The Jephson Gardens lie opposite the Pump Rooms on the river Leam which splits the town in two, Budapest style. The gardens were engulfed during Middle England’s catastrophic floods of 1998 but have been restored and substantially improved with funding from the National Lottery. What would our parks and gardens do without the vain weekly hopes of the innumerate lower orders, eh? A panorama of bandstands, larches and strapping youngsters, many of them students at the University of Warwick, it all looks very sweet and terribly English. For a sudden surreal dash of exoticism then, seek out the other bank of the Leam on Priory Terrace, and a gentle slipway leading down to the river. This was built in the nineteenth century so that the circus elephants in their winter quarters in Leamington could be watered. I came across this astonishing fact in several sources on the internet and it is either a case of cyber Chinese whispers or a fact worthy of repetition over foaming ale whenever the name of Leamington is mentioned. They claim to have invented lawn tennis here as well but if I’m going to believe one bit of trivia about the town I’d prefer it to be the pachyderm-based one.

  In 1612 John Speed wrote, ‘At Leamington, so far from the sea/a spring of salt water boileth up.’ Though this had been common knowledge since the Middle Ages, Leamington, like many of England’s spa towns, was a rural hamlet until the 1780s when it became fashionable amongst well-to-do Georgians to take the saline waters. It burgeoned as a resort town, attracting queen-to-be Victoria herself in 1831. So impressed was she, possibly even amused, that she later granted it full regal accreditation and thus humble Leamington Priors became Royal Leamington Spa. Older residents will pointedly use this nomenclature when asking skateboarders to turn their music down or writing frothing letters to the local press. Leamington has long had a reputation as a retirees’ dream town, which, coupled with its new popularity with students, gives it an interesting social mix.

  One local resident though, in his blog Oliver’s Poetry Garrett, is swooningly, flamboyant disparaging and captions a few fairly innocuous pictures of dustbins and the like with this: ‘For a change I thought I’d show you the real Royal Leamington Spa – the side of this quaint, Regency town in quaint old middle England that visitors don’t know exists. All the decay, tumbleweed and dereliction. The many bits of this tourist town that the council’s vast income from tax, parking charges and other sources does not reach. The flaking paint, crumbling buildings, faded glory.’ Clearly a sensitive soul. I hope the smelling salts were to hand, Oliver.

  Speaking of which, going back a century and a half, the town boomed on health tourism and so great were the number of annual visitors that in 1814 a large new building, the Pump Rooms, was designed and built by C.S. Smith of Warwick. Leam prospered thus until the coming of the railways made seaside holidays fashionable amongst the wealthy and affordable to the masses, and Leam’s loss was Brighton, Blackpool and Bournemouth’s gain. The resourceful Leamingtonians diversified into engineering and that too prospered until our manufacturing base crumbled, but the town still does quite nicely thank you via light industry, communications and the video game industry. If you know your MMRPGs and your shoot-em-ups, your Quakes, Mysts and Grand Theft Autos, you will maybe know the names of bleeding-edge games developers like Blitz, bigBig Studios, FreeStyle, Supersonic Software, Aqua Pacific, Codemasters, CustomPlay Games and fish-in-abottle. All are either based in or close to the town.

  But the hi-tech attractions of Leamington’s first commercial heyday were more lavatorial. The handsome Jephson Gardens commemorate Dr Henry Jephson, one of the leading figures in establishing Leamington as a health resort. In the newly restored Pump Rooms, a museum complex now gives a flavour and a whiff – metaphorical if not actual, perhaps thankfully – of the glory days of Leamington as a spa.

  Leamington’s doctors were aggressively propagandist about the virtues of the town’s waters, not just for bathing but, even less appetising, for drinking. There were three types available on draught, as it were: saline (salt), chalybeate (iron) and sulphurous (er, sulphur), and they were said to cure everything from ‘stiffness of the tendons’, ‘rigidity of the joints’, and ‘the effects of gout and rheumatism and various paralytic conditions’. ‘Imagine drinking the yellow-green sulphurous water
s,’ asks a thought-provoking sign. ‘They were said to be mildly laxative.’ That doesn’t surprise me; just the thought seems to have the desired effect.

  As if to prove this, there is a picture of one of the town’s evangelising docs, Dr John Hitchman, in a display case. Portraits of civic benefactors tend naturally towards the flattering and obsequious. Bucking this trend entertainingly, Hitchman here looks totally mental, like Einstein morphed with Ken Dodd on an amyl nitrate binge. Benjamin Satchwell, the enterprising local cobbler, postman and poet who saw the commercial possibilities of the town, doesn’t get his portrait hung here but gives his name to a pub in the town where altogether more palatable restorative liquids can be purchased.

  The good doctor Jephson set out some general rules for those who, burdened with a variety of ills, were planning to take the saline cures. There was a ‘season’ lasting from May till October. To get the best from the spa, patients were supposed to stay at least a month, drinking the spa waters and bathing in them two or three times a week. A recommended day would begin with a pint of the nauseating water followed by a constitutional around the town (a shaky one, I’ll wager) and then breakfast. It’s worth noting what Dr Jephson had to say on the matter of diet, which is salutary, and might warn us against taking the pronouncements of self-appointed experts too seriously. He, like our cheerless modern hamster-faced diet gurus, felt a good diet was crucial to health, and advocated stale bread, plain meat, plenty of sherry, black tea and butter and positively no fruit or veg. No five-a-day for Old Jephson unless it was five schooners of Harvey’s Bristol Cream or a quintet of lamb chops. Maybe that’s why Hitchman looks like he does in his portrait: happy but unhinged.

  Let us now consider the nicer element of spa life: luxuriating in hot water till prune-like. But again, if you expected spas of old to have the flavour of those darkened, aromatic basements in boutique hotels, full of the scents of sandalwood and jasmine, lit by flickering candles and populated by Stepford-ish creatures from Debenham’s perfume counter gliding serenely from massage chair to towel rack, think again. Spas of old were about bracing invigoration, not pampering. Here at the heart of Leamington’s Pump Rooms are various menacing-looking baths and an array of slings and stretchers. I was shocked at how disturbingly medicalised the whole process was, although an elderly Brummie lady nearby did look admiringly at the stand-up metal needle shower in its forbidding wire cage and say, ‘I could do with one of them at home.’

  The Zotofoam bath cured obesity, it was claimed, by increasing the user’s temperature and metabolic rate, which burned calories. An accompanying picture dating from the early twentieth century shows a ribald and rosy-looking fellow up to his head in billowing foam. An equally cheery and shockingly thin attendant looks on. Perhaps he too has immersed himself in the miracle waters. Or perhaps he’s drunk a pint or two of them. There are also vichy douches and alternating douches. But I didn’t like to ask.

  On the way out I dropped into the art gallery. Stanley Spencer’s wonderful, heavily symbolic Cookham Rise is here for reasons that are not explained beyond that it was presented by Alderman Holt in 1938. As someone who usually thinks of aldermen as fat blokes with watch fobs who stop the Sex Pistols coming to Wigan, I say, well done, Mr Holt. There’s also a very good Ivan Hitchens, a nice Leamington 1940s snow scene by Steven Bone and Sir Terry Frost’s Madrigal inspired by Auden’s poem of the same name, which he first came across in Leamington library. The town seems to attract artists, and I pause by a selection from new resident Jean-Pierre Kunzler. Jean-Pierre describes himself, depressingly, as ‘searching for the inner truths in human existence’. I’d have preferred it if he’d said he was interested in getting off with girls, drinking absinthe and mucking about in a smock.

  I quite liked the exhibition of folk art (a trade-union banner from the railway workers’ union, some graffiti, a few paintings of pigs by an unknown rural artist found in a barn and some photos of a girls’ night out) and would have stayed longer but the curator was by now looking at me and my notebook suspiciously as if to say no one can be this interested in pigs, trade-union banners or, for that matter, Royal Leamington Spa. Well, I was. And I quite liked Leam.

  I liked Buxton better, though. Maybe because I came to it in a lovely frame of mind, one gently nurtured by the hypnotic rhythms of the 10.37 from Manchester Piccadilly, the unfolding views of the Peak District foothills and the tide of fine towns that laps up against them: New Mills, Furness Vale, Whaley Bridge with its quaint, honeyed houses under the hill. You get the sense that this is where the austere grandeur of the northern lands meets the gentle warmth of Middle England. The fact that Vernon Elliot’s delicate, musty music from Oliver Postgate’s Pogles Wood and Ivor the Engine was playing on my iPod as the train pulled into Buxton made the arrival even nicer.

  Buxton feels like LA after Whaley Bridge but it’s still very pleasant indeed. The sort of place where – if, like me, you grew up in a dark factory town in a smoky hollow in the Lancashire plain – you would drive out to on Sunday trips and maybe would have moved to if Dad had won the pools. Stepping down from the train, you stand beneath ‘The Huge Fan Window’ as the plaque calls it. This is a somewhat literal description for what is, yes, a huge window in the shape of a fan. But you can see why Buxton is proud of it, not least because it was designed by Joseph Paxton, creator of Crystal Palace. That’s the splendid glass artefact not the undistinguished Sarf Landan football team.

  At just over a thousand feet above sea level, Buxton is the highest market town in England. Alston in Cumbria disputes this but it doesn’t have a regular market so, come on, Alston, do the math, as our American cousins say. In any case, Buxton is surely the highest spa. Get down off that Manchester or Sheffield train in January and it will feel like it too, high on a plain where shale, gritstone and limestone meet, hard and cold but high and mighty. Unlike Leamington Spa, it was the coming of the railway in 1863 that ushered in Buxton’s boom years, not its decline. Easy transportation made it extremely popular in the late Victorian era and the town’s finest houses and civic architecture date from this period. The mineral waters have been famous since Johnny Roman, a sucker for a long soak and a salty drink, called the place Aquae Arnemetiae. The Elizabethans were just as keen too and Mary Queen of Scots took the waters here while she was a prisoner at nearby Chatsworth. The 5th Duke of Devonshire had the commercial acumen to properly develop St Ann’s mineral springs in the 1780s by building the Assembly Rooms and Crescent, modelled on Bath’s famous royal one, in an attempt to lure the glitterati of the day away from the Cotswolds to hilly Derbyshire.

  After the Victorian boom, twentieth-century poshos tired of spas in favour of perhaps Noël Coward, cocaine and the Black Bottom, and Buxton settled into being what it is today: a high, handsome town popular with both northern commuters and those seeking to escape the urban rat race but not wanting to be completely out in the sticks. As an article in the Independent, wearily titled ‘Spas In Their Eyes’, had it, ‘Buxton conjures up images of grand buildings, ornamental gardens, quaint tea rooms and its eponymous bottled water. But the little spa town, a natural gateway to the beautiful Peak District national park, has been quietly broadening its appeal over recent years.’ What this means is that whilst Buxton remains refined and pretty, it isn’t fusty. It’s genteel and comfortable but with just enough rock and grit to ‘keep it real’, as the town’s huge gangster rap and hip-hop community would say. Actually I’ve made that up. But famous Buxtonians do include Vera Brittain, mum of Shirley Williams and author of Testament of Youth, and Tim Brooke-Taylor, slightly subversive Middle England comedy icon and thoroughly nice man. The family business, Brooke-Taylor’s solicitors, is one of the first things you see on the left bank of the curving street that leads to the town proper. It’s a mean street too if like me you skipped breakfast: Simply Thai, Pizza Express and the Indian Palace. In the Trisha vernacular I might say it was doing my head in. In which case, the Buxton Health Practice offering crani-sacral therapy a
nd metamorphic techniques might come in handy.

  The town’s museum is a former Museum of the Year award-winner. This surprises me. Not because it’s rubbish; far from it. But it is old-school in a way that I would have thought put off awards committees – neat and quirky and defiantly non-interactive. There are no buttons to press and no breathless exhortations to ‘Imagine what it must have been like to live in a Bronze Age settlement/attempt to broker a lasting peace at the interminable Versailles negotiations/have your shop windows broken during Kristallnacht/slaughter, rape and generally lay waste to great swathes of Central Europe as one of Genghis Khan’s Mongol Hordes!!!!’

  Not all history can be reduced to the level of a ‘Wiggles ‘n’ Giggles’ nursery-school play activity. Nor should it be. There should be mystery and awe and maybe a little fear too. I’m sure more kids have been turned into natural historians by that huge, forbidding dinosaur skeleton in London’s Natural History Museum than by any amount of flashing lights and touch pads. As I sometimes think I’m on my crotchety, prehistoric own about this, I was heartened to read Waldemar Januszczak on the mixed blessing of free museums in The Times of 27 April 2008: ‘Why is Halle Berry’s bikini in the Imperial War Museum …? Bond and his Aston Martin have nothing to do with the terrible realities of war when our young men are having their legs blown away in Iraq and Afghanistan … Pop along to the V&A on a Saturday afternoon and you won’t see gangs of newly interested teens from Peckham or bands of Asian youths from Brick Lane but lots of middle-class mums using our museums as a free playground. Not only are our museums failing to oppose the infantilisation of Britain, the damn places are spearheading it.’