His Grace decided to bring some of the charm of both cities to Derbyshire where his family seat was based nearby at the palatial -but isolated- Chatsworth House. Here in Buxton Georgiana’s radical set might play cards all night under his watchful eye.
So the celebrated architect, John Carr of York was dispatched by the Duke to Bath to study the Royal Crescent (1774). This, still one of the most famous buildings in Britain had been designed by John Wood Jnr as a unified sweep of 30 town house facades. In Buxton, Carr created only eight houses, but his design incorporated a thermal bath at one end of the crescent and assembly rooms at the other. This neo classical sweep was Bath in miniature, brought to the chilly Peak District.
Known variously as St Ann's Hotel and The Great Hotel, what is now The Crescent Hotel created the basis of tourism in Buxton. Other hotels sprang up nearby and the Duke built a luxurious stable for 120 carriage horses on the slopes behind his hotel.
Carr’s magnificent terrace of boarding houses cost £38,000 to complete, a huge amount of money in the 1780s. The headstrong Georgiana, on visiting the building site in 1783, wrote to her mother, "I never saw anything so magnificent as the Crescent though it must half ruin me.”
Fortunately William Cavendish, the 5th Duke of Devonshire was making plenty of money from his copper mines in Staffordshire. The Royal Navy had recently taken to copper-bottoming their fleet as the metal protected hulls and allowed British warships to sail faster.
Once opened, The Crescent became the flagship of Buxton tourism and remained so throughout the nineteenth century. It can be argued that, at a third of the width of Bath's Royal Crescent, its proportions are more pleasing to the eye. Wood’s Royal Crescent is just too big - whereas Carr's Crescent is clearly a work of beauty on a human scale. This fact is obvious to anyone walking their dog at 7am or, in my case, stumbling back from the nearby opera house at 11pm.
Sadly by the end of the twentieth century parts of this superb building lay derelict, while others were repurposed into council offices. The gracious assembly room -whose painted ceiling outshone anything offered in Bath- had been turned into the town's public library.
Reviving the Crescent was a major twenty-first century, with investment from two local councils, input from the National Lottery Heritage Fund, Historic England and the Ensana Group, which runs many spas in Europe. The total refurbishment cost was £67,500,000 of which two million alone went into the removal of pigeons and other vermin from the decaying structure.
Today the resulting accommodation is breath-takingly harmonious. The eight doors of the original eight hotel lodging houses have been retained (making it difficult to find the main door of the hotel, which has no obvious signage!). And there are eight original staircases to the first and second floors -rather than one grand floating staircase leading off reception. Every shade of paint is strictly drawn from what would have been available in the 1780s.
The newly revamped Ensana Crescent Hotel managed to open in 2020 for just 34 days before Covid lockdowns in Britain shut it down again. However since the end of the pandemic it has thriven with guests coming from across the north of England, the Midlands, as well as the Peak District. Crow's original thermal pool at the west end of the terrace has been restored with the very same iron canopy that the Victorians added, now beautifully glazed in blue stained glass. The spa’s naturally warm water arrives 5,000 years after raining down on Derbyshire. It has been boiling below Buxton for millennia before bubbling up in the spa town today. Because the water is untreated, the hotel pool must be drained every night and its tiles scrubbed clean of mineral deposits. Only then can it be refilled. This process takes eight hours before this very special facility can reopen at 8.30 the next morning. It costs a lot of money to visit the spa if you are not a guest of the hotel so make the most of it while staying.
Nowadays the Assembly Rooms at the east end of The Crescent is let out for functions. Its grand curving staircase leads past portraits of Duchess Georgiana, the 5th Duke, and John Carr, architect up to the splendid former public library. It's a lofty room with an exquisite ceiling moulded in pale pink, blue and yellow. James Turner, the Operations Manager, says that he only has to get a prospective bride and groom to view this room to guarantee its booking.
Opposite the curve of the hotel's gracious colonnade stands the original St Ann's Well, which was given a nineteenth-century makeover and is now a visitor centre. Next to it is a small fountain flowing with warm Buxton mineral water from the spring. Although this water is bottled these days by the Nestlé company and sold worldwide, here it is freely available to anyone who cares to fill a receptacle.
Around the corner of The Terrace is Buxton's Opera House, which was built in 1903 to designs by the great English theatre architect, Frank Macham. It's a fine Edwardian building flanked by two impressive cupolas. The opera house hosts an annual Gilbert & Sullivan Festival every summer, along with a diverse programme that ranges from An Evening with Joan Collins to a Ukrainian Rock Symphony Orchestra.
There is no doubt it was the 5th Duke's Terrace Hotel that put Buxton on the map of fashionable England, when it opened in 1789 and no doubt that its restoration has returned Buxton to the tourist map over 230 years later.
