New Bath Hotel

Details

MATLOCK BATH,
DERBY ROAD (West side),
New Bath Hotel

II

Hotel. 1745 with extensions of 1780-90, 1860, 1885 and 1895 and C20 alterations. Rubblestone, mostly rendered and whitewashed, with ashlar wing. Slate roofs with stone and painted stuccoed ridge and end stacks. 3 storeys and attics, and basement swimming pool. Late Classical style. Large square plan with wing to NW at an angle. Entrance front is a 7-window range in all at first floor of 2/2 sashes in moulded stucco surrounds, some with pediments. Similar windows to ground and second floors except French window to far left. Principal entrance to centre right within an open Doric porch. The front to right facing the old turnpike road has two gables facing with the centre infilled with a range with 2 2-storey canted bays. A similar 2-storey canted bay to the left gable with a large stucco panel over inscribed 'The New Bath Hotel' which is surmounted by an open curved pediment. The gable to right has a canted bay raised over the plunge bath which is in the basement and this has a 2/2 sash over on each floor. The garden front to the right of this similarly has 2/2 sashes with moulded stucco architraves. From the right end of this front projects the 3-storey wing of 1885. This is in ashlar with carved stone window frames, mostly filled with sashes. There is a large 2-storey canted bay to the centre.
Extending to left from the main entrance front is a single-storey rubblestone range probably C19 and originally a stable range. The other mainly C20 extensions are not of special architectural interest.
INTERIOR. Interior features include the plunge bath in the basement with a fine ashlar stone vault and various side and end openings probably all dating from 1745 when the bath first opened. An early/mid C19 staircase with thin turned balusters and curving hand-rail survives in the linking west wing to the rear and another in pine in the wing of 1885. Here is the large Arkwright Room with panelled doors and moulded architraves. Both these occur elsewhere in this wing. The hotel generally retains many original cornices and the room layout from the C19 and earlier, although with modern facilities carefully inserted.
HISTORY. The New Bath, as it became known, is the plunge bath in the basement of the present hotel. This was opened in May 1745 together with the hotel to its south and utilised the warm spring water for which Matlock Bath had become well-known at the end of the C17. This bath is now the only one of Matlock's two C18 baths to survive. The original hotel was the south and west parts of the present main range and then the bath was incorporated in the building at the end of the C18 when the north wing was built over it. The resulting U-plan was filled in and rationalised in the mid C19 and the north wing built in 1885. This fine complex displays its long evolution as a tourist hotel with, at its core, a particularly unusual survival of a C18 bath with the natural warm spring supplying it still running strongly.

End of official list entry

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