Buxton Crescent

While on our Great Northern Road Trip, Craig, Nick, and I had the pleasure of staying in the Buxton Crescent Hotel.

Obviously, this is a stunning hotel and a fantastic place to stay, but for someone like me who enjoys the story of how and why things came to be in the first place, the Crescent is an incredibly interesting location.

Many of us drink Buxton water on a regular basis, but being able to learn the story of its alleged healing power and how it led to something as impressive as the Crescent being built while standing on the site where it all happened was an experience I really enjoyed.

Buxton Water

Buxton’s story has always had its foundations in its spring water. Long before we even knew of its existence, Roman settlers were building around it. They named Buxton Aquae Arnemetiae. This made it one of only two places in Britain where the Romans developed settlements based entirely around their thermal natural mineral water springs. The only other location was Bath (Aquae Sulis).

The water that comes up through the ground in Buxton does so from a fault line that separates limestone from gritstone. This has gifted the town with warm, mineral-rich springs that meant, even after the Romans moved on, people kept coming. Even Mary Queen of Scots travelled to soak her joints in the healing waters of Buxton. She visited several times while under house arrest by the Earl of Shrewsbury.

Duke Of Devonshire

In the late 1700s, the 5th Duke of Devonshire had a vision for Buxton. He didn’t just want it to be another place where people came to experience the water. He wanted it to rival Bath as a northern Georgian spa town that could attract the fashionable (and wealthy) crowd.

The Duke called on the services of John Carr, an architect from York. While he wasn’t the most obvious choice, seeing how the Duke could pretty much afford to pay any of the best architects in the country, John Carr knew Buxton very well. He had visited in 1775 to treat himself in the water for his rheumatism. He also had good connections with the Duke’s social circle. As a result, John Carr played a huge role in the incredible story of Buxton Crescent.

Building the Crescent

John Carr’s design for The Crescent was ambitious to say the least. It was to have five lodging houses, two hotels, a row of shops, and a covered arcade connecting everything to the nearby baths. It was all arranged in a perfect semicircle. This made the Crescent stand out from the more common elliptical designs in places like Bath and Edinburgh.

At each end were the hotels, St Ann’s Hotel and the Great Hotel; two of the earliest purpose-built hotels in Britain. Between them, lodging houses offered rooms to suit different budgets. The higher-end ones looked out onto The Slopes (landscaped later to mirror the curve of the building), while the more affordable ones were at the back.

There were also Assembly Rooms (ballroom and card room) where the wealthy guests could dance, drink, and live something of a party life several nights a week. These rooms had chandeliers from London, mahogany doors, and plasterwork influenced by Robert Adam (the architect who influenced the development of Western architecture). Everything was made to look as impressive as possible. For example, there are stunning columns that are just for show and don’t actually support anything!

Carr considered pretty much every aspect of the Crescent and made sure it was stunning from every angle. Even the view from above was thought about by grouping the chimneys into tall, dramatic stacks visible from the hills.

The Crescent Opens Its Doors

When The Crescent opened in 1789, it was extremely successful. Buxton, already popular with writers, artists, and adventurers, suddenly had the infrastructure to match its reputation.

However, by the mid-1800s, tastes were changing, and the high-flyers of the time were moving more towards coastal locations. Attendance in the assembly rooms quickly dropped, and fewer people found Buxton as attractive as they once had.

An End And A New Beginning

The Crescent stayed active well into the 20th century. The Great Hotel rebranded as the Crescent Hotel in the late 1800s and eventually became part of the NHS in 1948. The St Ann’s Hotel at the western end managed to stay operational until the 1980s before being sold to a chain. Unfortunately, decades of underinvestment caught up with the Crescent and, after a storm destroyed part of the roof in 1990, it closed down.

Restoration And Reopening

Obviously, that’s not the end of the story though, as the Crescent underwent a full restoration and is now open once more as a stunning 5-star hotel.

Staying there a couple of weeks ago taught me a lot more than I expected and gave me a strong understanding of why buildings like this are far more important than a lot of people realise.

The full story of the Buxton Crescent, including its restoration, will be in the next issue of Driver Magazine (out in August 2025).

You can also read about the rest of our Great Northern Road Trip:

A Visit to Great Northern Classics

A Visit to the Great British Car Journey

A Visit to Crich Tramway Village

H&H Classics Buxton Auction