The Royal Pump Rooms is the most impressive building in Leamington Spa and the anchor of its spa heritage. The elegant Regency facade on the Parade conceals a complex that served as a fashionable bathing establishment throughout the nineteenth century, drawing royalty, aristocracy, and the merely wealthy to its thermal baths and assembly rooms.
Today the building houses the Leamington Spa Art Gallery and Museum, which holds an excellent collection of Dutch and Flemish paintings alongside local history displays. The Turkish Baths, restored to their Victorian splendour in the 1990s, are still open for bathing — one of the few places in England where you can still take the waters as the Georgians did. The adjoining Pump Room Gardens stretch north to the River Leam, with formal flowerbeds and a bandstand that hosts summer concerts.