Turkish baths in London

Harrow Road Turkish baths

The baths open

James Cotton Goudy opened the Harrow Road Turkish Baths in the autumn of 1879, probably in the last week of August. A Turkish bath and shampoo cost 1/6d, although ten tickets could be had for 12/6, and there were additional reductions for those taking out three, six, or twelve month subscriptions.

Originally catering for male bathers only, the establishment survived under a number of different proprietors for over eighty years, and was only closed in 1963 after the issue of a compulsory purchase order prior to the construction of a flyover leading to the M40 motorway.

Once inside the building, bathers left their shoes in pigeon-hole lockers and then passed through a curtain into the carpeted frigidarium where they undressed.

A short flight of stairs led down to the shampooing and washing area and, beyond it, the tepidarium. This was a large room with white tiled walls and marble slab seating, maintained at 140°F. Separated from it by curtained doors were the calidarium, 175-180°F, and laconicum, 220-230°F. These rooms were  similarly furnished but, 'for comfort, drab felt an inch thick covers the slabs and felt is also spread over the tesselated flooring to keep the feet easy'.

At the same level was a 5ft deep plunge pool (fed by a continuous stream of cold water), and the shampooing room with its marble slabs and basins, and a filtered, iced water, drinking fountain. The temperature here was around 120°F, and the room was located next to an array of different types of shower.

Back upstairs, the frigidarium, with its nineteen 'downy couches', encouraged bathers to relax before getting dressed again. Refreshments and cigars were also available, and there were facilities for playing chess, draughts, and dominoes.

In addition to the usual attendants, there were two shampooers, Messrs Evans and Smith, and a hairdresser and a chiropodist who were 'constantly in attendance'. It was also possible to consult Dr J Anderson, a visiting physician based in the locality.

The hot air in the baths was supplied by one of Constantine's Convoluted Stoves.

The ownership trail

The baths were closed late in 1885, though why they closed so soon is not definitely known. But when Goudy originally opened the baths, the local paper wrote, 'We believe it has never yet been attempted in London to give a Turkish bath, with all its accompaniments, for the charge of 1s 6d.'

It seems as though there was a reason why this had not been attempted before: that such a charge was too low for a reasonable profit to be made. And when the baths were bought by an auctioneer, Thomas Spink, and a building society secretary, Thomas Richards, both of whom seemed to know what they doing, the price structure was changed.

The new owners set about refurbishing the bath, and re-opened it on 27 February the following year as a 'Turkish Bathing Establishment for Gentlemen', managed by Mr Richard Hales Smith.

According to Charles Dickens's son, though he still referred to the baths as Goudy's, the baths were open from 7.00 am till 9.00 pm on weekdays and from 2.00 pm till 10.00 pm on Saturdays. But now there were two different admission charges. From 9.00 am (2.00 pm on Saturday) till 4.00 p.m, tickets cost 2s 6d, and only for the remaining hours were tickets still available for 1s 6d. In effect, these commercial baths were now being run with a two-class structure similar to that which was mandatory for local authority swimming pools.

Within four months, the new proprietors had set up a limited liability company to purchase the establishment (now known as The Paddington Hammam) for the sum of £2,500. Each of them was paid £500 in cash and £750 in company shares making them majority shareholders.

In 1890, barely four years later, the baths were bought by Henry and James Forder Neville, and the Paddington Hammam Company ceased trading. The Nevilles already owned four other establishments, including the Charing Cross baths in their recently built Northumberland Avenue headquarters, and were now seeking to enlarge their chain.

In due course they began to refurbish their new acquisition so as to make it closer in style and appearance to their other establishments. They also made the baths available, for the first time, to women bathers.

This change was short lived; by November the following year, the baths had reverted to being for gentlemen only. As James Forder Neville ruefully remarked to George Duckworth, when interviewed five years later for Charles Booth's Inquiry into the life and labour of the people in London, he had tried to start a ladies' bath at Paddington, but 'Paddington women won't take Turkish bath.'

According to an advertisement in a local newspaper published in 1918, a Turkish bath still cost the same as it did over 30 years earlier,  2/6d  or 1/6d.  Only  the hours when the baths were less expensive had changed, Nevill's charging the lower rate after six in the evening. These baths were also less expensive than any other Nevill's establishment and it is, perhaps, surprising that it was advertised as being 'The prettiest bath in London'.

By the end of the 1920s, the prices were still only 3/- and 2/-. Turkish baths declined in popularity after the first world war, and Nevill's made an effort to increase the number of their patrons and the frequency of their visits to the bath.

In the late 1930s they ran a series of advertisements  in the Marylebone Mercury which extolled the health benefits of the bath. They claimed that Turkish baths helped you to think more clearly and increased your energy levels; that they were one of the greatest aids in improving physical and mental fitness; and they encouraged patrons to make a New Year's Resolution to visit the baths regularly.

Other attempts to counteract the drop in income included a short period when the services of hairdressers and a chiropodist were available. This was unsuccessful and the experiment had ended by late 1941. More successful, judging by its continuation, was opening on Sundays between 8.00 am and 2.00 pm.

But after World War II the decline in Turkish bath usage continued and, having already closed their flagship Northumberland Avenue establishment in 1948, Nevill's sold their Harrow Road baths.

It seems to have then been known both as Metro Turkish Baths and as Tyler's Turkish Baths, presumably after its new proprietor F L Tyler. But soon afterwards it was being advertised as The Metro Turkish Baths Ltd (which may have been a company owned by Tyler). Further research is needed to clarify the ownership during this period.

By all accounts, few improvements were made during the last years of its existence so that, inside, it continued to look like a Nevill's Turkish bath. Outside, its tiled frontage, complete with an Islamic star and crescent, appears in a film made in 1960 to record the area before redevelopment.

Two significant changes were made, however, when Metro took over the baths.

First, the whole of Sunday, from 10.00 till 6.00, was made into a women's day. This seemed to be successful, showing, perhaps, that a social change had taken place since James Forder Neville's comment about Paddington women in his 1896 interview.

Second, the baths were now open, night and day, from Sunday night till Saturday, making the baths popular as an inexpensive night's stay, and bringing in a new clientele.

Both these changes continued until 1963 when the baths closed.

Inside the baths in the 20th century

After forty years or so, Mike Young still remembered the appearance of the baths in great detail as it was in the late 1950s, and his description is all that one might expect from the eye of a professional designer.

The baths were built behind a normal shop front with a plain red door. Set into it was a small square Arabic style grille through which a bather could be checked over before being allowed in. Once inside the reception area, outdoor shoes were removed and stored out of sight, and valuables were locked in green mini-drawer-safes.

Past the reception area and through a Moorish arched wooden screen were narrow bed spaces for changing and resting after the bath. Each had its own light with a white shade. Otherwise everything in the cubicle was painted dark red, the colour of the curtain covering its entrance. The ceilings were in Victorian style Moorish designs made in embossed metal squares; the fittings were of metal and wood; the walls plastered and painted.

At the far end of the room there was a void in the ceiling allowing bathers a view of the balcony upstairs. Ranged round this were additional cubicles, some of which were designed to take two beds. Over the void was a dome housing the main ventilator and from it were suspended a golden crescent moon and a star—the Islamic symbols to be found in Turkish baths all over the world.

The Turkish bath itself was at the far end of the basement, the air being heated by a stove in the hotter of two interconnected hot rooms. The walls separating the hot rooms from each other, and from the rest of the baths, were like shop windows, glass stretching from chairback height to ceiling. Around each of the hot rooms, below the windows, were white marble seats with canvas cushions and seat backs to stop bathers burning themselves. Slung across both doorways, so as to keep the hottest air inside, were short canvas curtains hanging down to chest height.

Outside the hot rooms were two slabs for shampooing. There were overflowing fountains and special metal water scoops that were used by the shampooers to send torrents of cold water over the marble before and during a shampoo. There was also a small plunge pool, and a very long and narrow steam room. The walls of the wet areas were covered with ceramic tiles, the ceilings were enamelled metal tiles in cream and white, and the whole basement was quite light and airy.

During the inter-war years, 1918-39, when the number of Turkish baths declined considerably, the nature of some of those which survived (especially those in the capital) began to change. Increasingly the baths' clientele were seen as belonging to one of two groups, self-recognising, but by no means mutually exclusive.

A public/private 'queer-tolerant space'

Those who were thought of as belonging, in the absence of any contrary evidence, to the traditional Turkish bath clientele, tended to use the baths mainly during the daytime. But increasingly during this period, the baths came to be used more openly by homosexual men who saw them as a relatively safe place for meeting friends, socialising, and making assignations. These bathers tended to arrive later in the evening and, where facilities allowed, to stay the night.

Eric Wright remembers the Harrow Road Turkish Baths, with its relatively low admission charge, as being towards the end,

rather downmarket, but very popular with the night owls who often queued waiting to get in after the pubs closed … [It was] very much cheaper than finding a hotel room for anybody passing through London overnight or catching an early train. Not that many people managed to get much sleep with all that toing and froing going on.

The Harrow Road Turkish bath was probably very little different, by day, from any of the other establishments to be found in London or elsewhere in the country. But at night it became a different place. At some unknown date, the opening hours had been extended and the bath became one of three in London which remained open all night. In fact the only time it closed during the week was between nine in the morning on Sunday, until the same hour the following day.

Our understanding of the extent to which sexual activity was taking place within London Turkish baths, the attitudes of the bath attendants and other bathers to this activity, and the confidence-building effect on the gay community of this re-appropriation of public safe spaces, has until recently relied mainly on hearsay, gossip, and the occasional derogatory remark from a less tolerant member of society.

But in a chapter in his study of 'space, identities and queer male practices', Matt Houlbrook has investigated male homosexual attitudes and behaviour in these three all-night London Turkish baths. Drawing upon sound archives, interviews, council minutes, and court cases, he shows that in the mid-twentieth century years—when a homosexual act between consenting male adults was still a criminal offence—each of these establishments became a haven of tolerance. In these Turkish baths, and doubtless in others outside London,

men forged a public sexual culture with its own protocols and micro-geography which was remarkably insulated from surveillance and hostility: a functionally private and queer tolerant space in which they could meet friends, relax and enjoy sexual encounters without fear.

The boundaries between public and private activities were reinforced by what Houlbrook refers to as the sexual micro-geography of the baths: cruising was tolerated in the public hot rooms, showers and corridors; sexual encounters were kept within the cubicles.

One interviewee quoted by Houlbrook noted that at Harrow Road you used to hear the grunts and groans throughout the night and that in the upstairs cubicles, each designed to take two beds, it was easy to slip into another's bed without any trouble. From time to time the boundaries may have disappeared, but only to reappear again if things were deemed to have gone too far. Nevertheless,

The extent to which men were prepared to engage in public sex—with no fear of arrest or violence—suggests that the baths had become their space.

It seems important to remember that not everyone who used Harrow Road Turkish baths in the evening, or even at night, was gay; nor was everyone who used the baths during the day necessarily heterosexual—important because the groups seem to have been, in practice, mutually tolerant.

This tolerance, also to be found in the Savoy and Imperial Turkish baths, was perhaps the harbinger of changing attitudes within the country as a whole, which had, within the next few years, finally accepted that there was an urgent need for changes in the law relating to the behaviour in private of such a significant proportion of the male population at large.

This page revised and enlarged 4 August 2022