An East London bar flying the name of Buxton – the ancient Derbyshire spa town famous, above all, for its pure and celebrated waters
The Buxton carries a 4.4 across more than seven hundred reviews and flies a name with a genteel, watery, spa-town ring. The Prat’s naming desk, fond of a name with a place behind it, followed the trail up to the Derbyshire hills.
Towards the City fringe, East London
The Buxton sits on the eastern fringe near the City, north of the river – a geographic stray in this south-bank survey, caught by the scrape’s reach. We flag it plainly, as ever.
The spa town
Buxton is one of England’s great old spa towns – a handsome Georgian town high in the Derbyshire Peak District, famous for centuries for its natural thermal springs and its pure mineral water. The Romans knew and used its warm waters; in the Georgian age it became a fashionable spa resort, where the well-to-do came to “take the waters” for their health, promenading in its elegant crescents and drinking from its celebrated springs. To this day, Buxton’s name is carried across the country on bottles of its famous mineral water, one of the best-known in Britain. It is a name that means, above all, pure and celebrated water.
The water and the drink
The Prat’s favourite thing is the gentle irony of a spa-water name over a bar. Buxton is famous for its pure water – the healthful, teetotal draught taken for one’s constitution – and here the name flies over a place devoted to rather stronger and less wholesome refreshment. There is a nice wit in it: the celebrated spring water of the temperance-minded spa town, lending its clean, healthful name to a bar. Water, after all, is the base of every drink, and Buxton’s is among the most famous water in the land – a fitting, if cheeky, thing for a bar to invoke.
The genteel name
What the Prat enjoys is the whiff of Georgian gentility the name carries. Buxton summons the elegant world of the spa resort – the pump room, the crescent, the fashionable visitors taking the waters, the whole refined leisure of the eighteenth-century spa. A bar called the Buxton borrows a little of that genteel, health-giving, watery elegance, striking a note of old-fashioned refinement. The 4.4 across seven hundred reviews is a solid score for so genteel and watery a name.
The Prat’s naming desk adds a closing thought on the enduring appeal of the spa. For all its Georgian gentility, the spa town answered a very human and very timeless wish – the desire to go somewhere restorative, to take a break from the world, to be made to feel well again. People travelled to Buxton to be restored, refreshed and renewed. A good bar, in its own way, offers a version of that same restoration – a place to escape the week, unwind, and be made to feel better – so the spa-town name, beneath its wit, points at something a bar genuinely does provide. The waters of Buxton healed the body; a decent pint, its patrons would argue, does something similar for the soul.
Verdict
A 4.4 across seven hundred-plus reviews is a solid score, and the Buxton earns it on a genteel, spa-town name. It flies Buxton – the elegant Derbyshire spa town famous for its pure and celebrated waters – with a nice wit in planting a spa-water name over a bar devoted to rather stronger stuff.
Go for the welcome and the genteel spa-town ring of the name, and raise a glass at the Buxton. The town gave its name to the purest of waters, taken for one’s health – and here lends its clean, celebrated name, with a wink, to something a good deal less wholesome.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
Someone thinking they should move out of London to the English countryside. You won’t because London’s institutional dysfunction is at least familiar.
This reads like someone’s been quietly furious for fifteen years and finally decided to write it down.