From Fashionable Cure-All to Comeback Star: The Story of the English Spa with Melanie King

From Fashionable Cure-All to Comeback Star: The Story of the English Spa

Melanie King

The English have always been a nation of bath-lovers. Archaeologists now believe that Britons were ‘taking the waters’ long before the Romans arrived in 43 AD. Over the centuries, English bathing culture became riotous, salacious, and occasionally downright dangerous – nowhere more so than in the so-called ‘healing’ treatments that often did more harm than good, such as drinking pints of spa water in which diseased bathers had been happily paddling moments before.

English spas drew everyone from royalty – Queen Anne sought relief from gout at Bath – to the poor of Harrogate, who, after bravely swallowing the town’s sulphurous waters, often found themselves adding diarrhoea to their list of troubles.

This talk offers a lively romp through the centuries, tracing the extraordinary story of English spas from their earliest origins to their 21st-century reinvention as modern temples of beauty and wellness

Melanie King is a social historian, speaker, and the author of eight books, exploring subjects ranging from 18th-century health cures to espionage. She is also the founder of The History Forum, a popular online lecture series featuring history professionals, running annually from September to May.

Renowned for her engaging storytelling and immersive research methods, Melanie brings history to life in unexpected ways. For The Secret History of English Spas, she tracked down obscure mineral springs across England. Her book The Lady is a Spy led her to archives in England, Italy, Canada, and the U.S., tracing the lives of two women held in Moscow’s Lubyanka prison in 1920. Her upcoming 2026 book on the social history of ice cream took her to Bologna’s Carpigiani Gelato University, where she learned to make gelato first-hand.

Melanie holds a degree in International Relations from the University of Sussex and has lived and worked across the globe. Her varied career includes roles at The Nation newspaper in Bangkok, the EU in Brussels, Chatham House in London, and work with refugees in Thailand and the UK. Before becoming a full-time writer and speaker in 2004, she also served as a university careers adviser.