page_title: Buxton
section_title: Spa town boom
hierarchical_section_title: Buxton / History / Spa town boom
caption_attribution_description: English: A thriving Buxton in 1965 with shoppers and tourists filling Spring Gardens.
context_page_description: Buxton is a spa town in Derbyshire, in the East Midlands region of England. It has the highest elevation – about 1,000 feet above sea level – of any market town in England. Close to the county boundary with Cheshire to the west and Staffordshire to the south, Buxton is described as "the gateway to the Peak District National Park". A municipal borough until 1974, Buxton was then merged with other localities lying primarily to the north, including Glossop, to form the local government district and borough of High Peak within the county of Derbyshire. It is also near to Greater Manchester. The population of the town was 22,115 at the 2011 Census.
  Buxton landmarks include Poole's Cavern, an extensive limestone cavern open to the public, and St Ann's Well, fed by the geothermal spring bottled and sold internationally by Buxton Mineral Water Company. Also in the town is the Buxton Opera House, which hosts several music and theatre festivals each year. The Devonshire Campus of the University of Derby is housed in one of the town's historic buildings.
  Buxton is twinned with two towns: Oignies in France and Bad Nauheim in Germany.
context_section_description: Built on the River Wye, and overlooked by Axe Edge Moor, Buxton has a history as a spa town due to its geothermal spring which rises at a constant temperature of 28 °C. The spring waters are piped to St Ann's Well (a shrine to St. Anne since medieval times) at the foot of The Slopes, opposite the Crescent near the town centre. The well was declared to be one of the Seven Wonders of the Peak by philosopher Thomas Hobbes in his 1636 book De Mirabilibus Pecci: Being The Wonders of the Peak in Darby-shire.
  The Dukes of Devonshire have been closely involved with Buxton since 1780, when the 5th Duke used the profits from his copper mines to develop the town as a spa in the style of Bath. Their ancestor Bess of Hardwick had taken one of her four husbands, the Earl of Shrewsbury, to "take the waters" at Buxton shortly after he became the gaoler of Mary, Queen of Scots, in 1569, and they took Mary there in 1573. She called Buxton "La Fontagne de Bogsby", and stayed at the site of the Old Hall Hotel. The area features in the poetry of W. H. Auden and the novels of Jane Austen and Emily Brontë.
  Instrumental in the popularity of Buxton was the recommendation by Erasmus Darwin of the waters at Buxton and Matlock to Josiah Wedgwood I. The Wedgwood family often went to Buxton on holiday and recommended the area to their friends. Two of Charles Darwin's half-cousins, Edward Levett Darwin and Reginald Darwin, settled there.  The arrival of the railway in 1863 stimulated the town's growth: the population of 1,800 in 1861 had grown to over 6,000 by 1881.
caption: Buxton in 1965 with shoppers and tourists filling Spring Gardens
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