The Four Wells

Within about twenty-five miles of each other, in the middle of an emptying agricultural county, four towns spent the nineteenth century selling water to people from Birmingham and the south Wales coalfield.

Llandrindod Wells, Builth Wells, Llanwrtyd Wells and Llangammarch Wells. No other part of Britain has a cluster like it, and the reason is geological accident meeting a railway.

The water

Mid Wales sits on rocks that produce mineral springs of several different kinds, and each town marketed a different one.

Llandrindod had the widest range — saline, sulphur, magnesium and chalybeate springs all within walking distance of the station, which allowed it to claim a treatment for almost anything.

Llanwrtyd had sulphur, at Ffynnon Drewllyd, the stinking well. Hydrogen sulphide, taken for skin complaints and digestion.

Llangammarch had barium chloride, and claimed uniqueness in Britain for it. It was marketed for heart conditions.

Builth had saline and sulphur at Park Wells and Glanne.

Whether any of it did anything is a separate question. Spa medicine of the period combined genuine effects — rest, exercise, clean air, a break from an industrial city, and in some cases actual pharmacology — with a great deal of confident nonsense.

The railway made it

None of this could have happened without trains, and the dates line up precisely.

The Central Wales line reached Llandrindod in the mid-1860s. Within twenty years the town had gone from a church and a few farms to a resort handling something in the order of eighty thousand visitors a season, laid out speculatively with wide streets, hotel terraces, a pump room and a park.

That is the striking thing about Llandrindod. It is not an old settlement that acquired a spa. It is a spa that acquired a settlement, built all at once between the 1860s and 1914, and there is almost nothing in the town centre outside those dates.

Two different clienteles

The four towns were not selling to the same people, and it shows in the architecture.

Llandrindod aimed at the English middle class and built accordingly: large hotels, formal gardens, a bandstand, an assembly of buildings that would not look out of place in Harrogate.

Llanwrtyd and Llangammarch drew heavily on Welsh-speaking nonconformists from the coalfield, and became summer gathering places for chapel congregations. The buildings are plainer and the scale is smaller, and the social character was completely different — temperance, preaching meetings and singing rather than a bandstand and a hotel dinner.

Builth barely counts as a spa town at all. It was a functioning market town first and added the water as a sideline, which is why it survived the collapse better than the others.

The collapse

1914 ended it, comprehensively and almost everywhere in Britain. The visitors did not come back in the same numbers after the war, foreign travel opened up for those who could afford it, and medical opinion moved on.

The National Health Service finished the argument. If treatment was free at a hospital, paying to drink sulphur water in a Welsh town was a holiday rather than a cure, and there were better holidays available.

What it left

Buildings out of all proportion to the populations that now use them. Llandrindod has hotel capacity, assembly rooms and civic architecture built for a resort of eighty thousand seasonal visitors.

That surplus turned out to be the town's second act. Radnorshire's county administration moved there because it was central and had rooms, and in 1974 the new county of Powys made it the county town for the same reasons.

So the administrative centre of the largest county in Wales is a Victorian speculative development that failed at what it was built for.

What to look for

Pump rooms and pavilions, several converted. Long hotel terraces with too many windows. Formal parks with ornamental lakes dug in the 1870s. Boarding houses with names like Bryn Villa in rows built for a season that stopped coming.

And the springs themselves, most of them still running, most of them now with a small plaque and nobody drinking from them.