This September Mr Tabubil and I attended the Buxton Georgian Festival with a party of friends. “Georgian” is a broad field, and our group decided to run with the years 1805-1815, so we were all about breeches and tail coats and bonnets and spencer jackets and high waisted empire dresses!
Buxton is a beautiful little hill town in Derbyshire: green hills, golden stone, and amazing skies. Like the much larger city of Bath, Buxton also has its own Georgian crescent, this one centered on a warm-water natural hot spring – St Ann’s well. Buxton’s crescent was built in the 1780s by the fifth Duke of Devonshire. Designed by architect John Carr, it was the centerpiece of a spa complex that the fifth Duke hoped would put Buxton on the tourist map. And it worked. When the Napoleonic wars shut down international travel, domestic tourists came to this elegant little hill town.
The tourists kept coming even after the continent reopened; a natural warm spring housed in an elegant building kept the town going through the 19th century as a medicinal spa.
A friend who comes every year to the Buxton Georgian Festival told me she reckons that the Assembly rooms here in Buxton are the prettiest in England. I can’t say that she was wrong.
To be completely honest, I wasn’t at my best during this year’s festival. I missed several events due to a bad stomach flu (We’re blaming a sandwich eaten on the train up from London) and after 3 days of not eating and barely drinking, my carefully tailored garments were hanging off of me! But I was up to a promenade:
A local group, the Pattern, HM 33rd Regiment of Foot headed up the Buxton Georgian festival parade,
A personal favorite was this fellow who came dressed as a French prisoner of war!
Eagle eyes might notice that between several of these photos Mr. Tabubil has switched out his boots! He started the event with a pair of rubber riding boots from Decathlon. Our milliner friend Jane had brought her son’s boots to sell on at the festival.
“See if they fit.” she said.
The ground floor of the assembly rooms were being used for a market and Mr. Tabubil and I I nipped out of the market hall and found a back passage with a wooden settle. Mr. Tabubil settled and I squatted on the floor and grabbed his left foot.
Rubber riding boots have… suction.
“BRACE!!!!”
A small elderly woman in full regency dress from her booted toes up to the feathers on her bonnet came around a corner to find two regency reenactors in the most extraordinary tableaux – myself squatting on the floor with a solid grip on a boot, and Mr. Tabubil pressed back against the settle with one hand around a wooden post and the other flung out against the wall to grab onto a doorknob.
“BRACE! BRACE! BRACE! PUUUUULL!”
The woman’s mouth dropped, and the first boot popped off and the impact knocked me onto my behind on the floor, she gave us a round of applause. She stuck around for the second boot, too.
The new ones fit Mr. Tabubil like a glove.
“AND they’re already broken in” he said proudly.
I dusted off my rear and Mr. Tabubil strode forth, feeling “a lot more period and less like I’m slogging through a rubber swamp, actually. And next time I need a cane to carry when I wear them. A cane with a silver top.”
Jane also made both of our hats: Mr. Tabubil’s tall hat and my own seagrass bonnet!
What with the stomach flu and the boots, I was feeling a bit wobbly after the market, and we all repaired to the Pump Room to take the waters. A 16th century act of Parliament had decreed that the water from the well must be freely available to the residents of Buxton. There is a well fountain outside the pump room where I would see locals come with with bottles to fill them up with spring water.
Inside the pump house there is another fountain. They give you a glass for the asking.
I was informed that my drooping curls were serving Lady Catherine de Bourgh (1995 A&E version.) All of me felt like it was drooping. I’d lacked the energy that morning to pin them higher on my head, but if what i was serving was Lady Catherine de Bourgh? That was a spirit I could work with. Except that it’s impossible to look down upon such lovely people as these!
St Ann’s water (and fruit juice and buns and a mild Austen-ian-supervillain superiority complex) perked all of us up, and we went out for a promenade of our own!
