Whatever happened to the British Spa Federation?

For much of the twentieth century, Britain’s spa towns had something they no longer possess: a national body bringing together the places, people, waters and ideas that made them distinctive. Its story feels surprisingly relevant again.

Spend enough time digging around in the history of Britain’s spa towns and the same name begins to appear: the British Spa Federation.

It turns up in old handbooks and advertisements, medical papers and council records. Bath, Buxton, Cheltenham, Droitwich, Harrogate, Leamington, Llandrindod Wells, Woodhall Spa. Places with different waters, landscapes and traditions, but a shared understanding that they belonged to something larger.

The name has a pleasing confidence to it yet it also raises an obvious question.

What happened to it?

A federation of waters

The beginnings of the Federation sit in a remarkable period for Britain’s spas.

Before the First World War, taking the waters was still an established part of British life. Spa towns combined medicine and treatment with gardens, promenades, music, hotels, social life and escape. The cure was never simply a bath or a glass of mineral water. It was an entire environment organised around health.

The war disrupted that culture dramatically. Foreign travel became difficult, wounded servicemen arrived in British spa towns for treatment, and hydrotherapy found a new role in military rehabilitation. The idea of Britain’s “Home Spas” gathered momentum.

A Federation of British Spas emerged during the war and published its first handbook in 1916. In 1921 it was formally ratified as the British Spas Federation.

Its members included local authorities, medical trusts and other organisations responsible for spa facilities. Its interests covered treatments, staff, administration and medical supervision, but also scientific research, relationships with universities, publicity, cultural activities and collective action on behalf of its members. In other words, it understood the spa as a integrative approach.

Harrogate was part of the story

Harrogate was there from the beginning. By 1920 the Federation included Bath, Buxton, Cheltenham, Droitwich, Harrogate, Llandrindod Wells and Woodhall Spa, with Leamington and Strathpeffer joining soon afterwards. One of the Federation’s important early figures was F. J. C. Broome, General Manager of Harrogate Corporation’s spa facilities, who had previously worked at Buxton.

They were competitors, of course, but they also understood that the fortunes of British spa culture were connected. If the idea of the British spa became stronger, each individual town benefited. Knowledge could be shared, standards improved, research developed and a collective case made nationally.

In 1929 The Spectator described the Federation as doing valuable work to strengthen conditions in British spas and make their facilities more widely known. The following year, the Federation was being discussed in Parliament as part of attempts to make spa treatment available to insured working people, with arrangements developed alongside the medical profession and friendly societies. This was spa culture operating at a scale we have largely forgotten.

By 1963, eight Federation towns were still providing around 300,000 treatments a year, with approximately 90 per cent delivered through the NHS.

The relationship did not last though as hospitals developed their own hydrotherapy and physiotherapy facilities, medical fashions changed, public investment declined and many of the traditional spa establishments gradually closed.

The waters remained. The buildings remained. The parks, promenades, hotels, theatres and peculiar urban landscapes created around the cure remained. But, the system connecting them began to disappear.

Reinvention, and another kind of spa

The Federation itself proved remarkably persistent. During the late 1970s it worked with the British Tourist Authority on study visits to continental European spas. In the 1980s it became involved in attempts to revive British spa facilities, including the new Brine Baths at Droitwich. Its later “Spas 2000” policy encouraged investment in spa towns, renewed public access to waters and the reintroduction of spa facilities into hotels and new developments.

There was a renewed internationalism too. The Federation celebrated its 75th anniversary in 1996. It organised conferences with the University of Sussex, including a spa and mineral waters gathering in Harrogate in 2000, and became a founder member of the European Spas Association.

But something else was happening... The word spa was changing.

Across Britain a rapidly growing private industry of hotel spas, beauty treatments, leisure facilities and health clubs was emerging. It was commercially successful and culturally powerful, but increasingly detached from the mineral springs, landscapes and historic spa towns from which the word had come.

The British Spa Federation finally closed in 2004. Its remaining membership and assets were brought together with the European chapter of the International Spa Association to create the Spa Business Association, focused increasingly on the expanding commercial spa sector.

In 2013, the Spa Business Association merged with the British International Spa Association to form the UK Spa Association, with priorities including education, accreditation and market intelligence for the modern spa industry.

There is a lineage there, but the purpose had changed. And somewhere along the way, Britain lost its national voice for spa towns themselves.

What disappeared with it?

A spa business and a spa town are related ideas, but they are not the same thing.

A spa town begins with water. Around that water grows an extraordinary anatomy: wells and pump rooms, baths and hospitals, gardens and woods, promenades, hotels, theatres, music, exercise, food, sociability, architecture and ritual.

UNESCO’s inscription of the Great Spa Towns of Europe in 2021 captures exactly this idea. Its eleven towns are recognised not simply for individual buildings or springs, but for complete urban ensembles shaped by mineral waters and a culture of the cure. Bath is Britain’s sole member of the group.

Seen through that lens, the old British Spa Federation starts to look rather interesting again.

Its world cannot simply be reconstructed and nor should it be. Medicine has changed, society has changed and our understanding of health has changed enormously.

But many of the questions the Federation grappled with have returned in different forms.

How do we protect mineral springs and their landscapes? How do historic spa buildings find useful contemporary lives? How can nature, movement, water, culture and social life contribute to healthier places? How do towns develop distinctive economies rooted in their own character? How can research and knowledge be shared? And how do Britain’s spa towns speak to one another, and to their counterparts across Europe?

These are questions about our heritage, certainly, but they are equally questions about the future.

Perhaps it is an idea worth revisiting

At Harrogate Spa Society, we have become increasingly interested in the British Spa Federation because it represents something that is currently missing.

There are excellent organisations concerned with heritage, tourism, health, water and the contemporary spa industry. Individual spa towns are doing fascinating work too. What Britain no longer has is a forum concerned specifically with the spa town as a place, bringing its waters, landscape, culture, architecture, knowledge and contemporary life back ino the same conversation.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about rediscovering the Federation is therefore not nostalgia for an organisation that disappeared more than twenty years ago but the realisation that the problem it was created to address has never entirely gone away.

Britain still has an extraordinary constellation of spa towns, watering places and mineral springs. Some are flourishing. Some have almost forgotten why they developed in the first place. All possess stories, landscapes and knowledge that become more valuable when they are connected.

We have started talking with others about what a new national conversation between those places might look like.

A century after the British Spa Federation first brought the Home Spas together, perhaps there is still some life in the idea.