Hot Water

I have seen historical documentary footage and still photographs of 'The Potteries' - the area around Stoke-on-Trent - depicting an alien, eerie landscape dotted with pottrry kilns, like squat, stone milk bottles, wreathed in smoke. Almost the entire population of the region was engaged in creating the pots, stacking and unloading the kilns (all by hand), decorating the pottery and packing them for distribution. It was extremely hard work, at the same time highly skilled and extremely damaging to health - lung conditions being particularly common

Unlike the cotton mills of the north or the dock warehouses of the port cities, very little of the old Potteries infrastructure remains. There is very little collective memory of the unique Black Country communities and, when the Industrial Revolution is invoked, most people think of Lowry's tall, smoking mill chimneys, not the low, drifting smile of hundreds of kilns

The Minton pottery family ran an independent manufacturing business in Stoke from 1793 to 1968. They produced many products over the decades but are particularly remembered for their tiles, which are (or were) used in the Palace of Westminster and the US Capitol, but also here, in a former Thermal Bath, built in 1854, in Buxton, Derbyshire

The Victorian health obsession with "taking the waters" provoked the development of spa towns and "baths" the length and breadth of Britain, along with associated ornate architecture, hotels, pleasure gardens, fountains and pseudo-medical 'rooms' where affluent customers could receive mystical "treatments", along with their healing immersion in the spring-purified, mineral enriched or geo-thermal waters, depending on the town concerned

Much more of this alternative-health architecture survives than the industrial relics of The Potteries - in fact it is the key element in the historic development and contemporary appearance of many "spa" towns. Perhaps it's just as well; if the junior doctors and other desperate health professionals fail in their attempts to force our government to apply some life-supoort to the NHS, after thirteen years of malign neglect and ideological fire-raising, taking the waters may be the only health care option still available to us. A thermal bath would have been a welcome balm today, as the sleet descended on Buxton