Laundry

The wash house as shown in the plan on the left (above) must have come into existence sometime between 1857 and 1861. According to the 1855-57 Old Town Survey the room shown on the 1862 floor plan as a wash house was being used as a brewhouse and the brewhouse was listed as part of the premises when it came up for auction in 1856. Curiously, the auction particulars include reference to an ironing room but no wash room – yet there must have been one somewhere in the building otherwise there would have been nothing to iron! Once washed, damp towels and any clothes would be taken via the yard back into the main part of the building and placed into the hot closet to be dried out.

The 1898 floor plan shows that the wash house had been considerably upgraded to a proper laundry. The hot closet has been replaced by a bath room and part of the yard has been built on to provide a drying room to adjoin the laundry; this was almost certainly done at the time of the 1869/70 renovations.

While clearly a busy bathing establishment would require a regular turnover of towels it is possible that it also took in work from outside as an additional source of income: note that the laundry now has its own entrance directly off of the passageway at the rear of the building leading to both Wellington Street and Oriel Road. Such an entrance seems unnecessary if all its work was internal.

A year after this floor plan was created the entire property was sold but the laundry continued under new ownership in 1900.

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55 Bath Road (the corner shop)

Bootmaker

A Wright was a boot and shoe manufacturer with his own premises at the top of Bath Road very near the High Street. In late 1856 he was forced to move out while his shop was being rebuilt and took a very brief tenancy on the corner shop at the Baths which had been the bakery until the flood of 1855. We only know of his time here due to an advertisement in the Cheltenham Chronicle of 20 January 1857 drawing attention to his temporary home and his stock of velvet and felt boots and slippers and warm socks. By April Wright had returned to his usual premises.

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1 Oriel Road

House Decorator

In the 1871 census decorator Frederick Bennett is listed as living along with wife, three children and a boarder – also a child – at 1 Oriel Road, the shop once occupied by Eccles the gilder. He probably lived in the substantial rooms over and used the shop as a store for his equipment. We don’t know precisely when he began residing at the Baths but he was certainly there in 1868 when the Conservatives tried – and failed -to prevent Bennett, who was a Liberal, voting in the general election that year. We don’t know precisely when he left but by the time of the 1881 census he is living in Walton, Suffolk. For the rest of this period it seems to have been solely a private residence.

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The stores

Fruiterer

Another tenant we know little of, or the exact length of his tenure, is Samuel Hicks the fruiterer. We know that in 1887 he had two shops in St James’ Street and Hewlett Road but was simultaneously renting the stores that had previously been the steam mill. He also employed a coachman who met an unfortunate end at the Baths, Jeremiah Page, presumably to bring fruit from the stores to his shops which were not large enough for storage. It is possible that he also acted as a wholesaler to other merchants around the town – which would make further sense of employing a coachman – and potentially to greengrocer Robert Steel.

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