Aims and content

This is a single frame, printer-friendly page taken from Malcolm Shifrin's website
Victorian Turkish Baths: their origin, development, and gradual decline

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Aims and content

The history of the Victorian Turkish bath is virtually uncharted, so the website is an attempt to interest historians in an aspect of Victorian life which has been almost totally forgotten. The reintroduction of the so-called Turkish (actually Roman) bath into the British Isles in 1856 was largely achieved by David Urquhart (with his Foreign Affairs Committees) and Irish physician and hydropathist Richard Barter who—inspired by Urquhart—built the first Victorian Turkish bath at his hydro near Blarney in Co Cork.

It has been created by a retired media resources librarian and historian who first bathed in London's Imperial Hotel Turkish baths in the early 1950s, and has been interested in the history of  the Turkish bath since 1990.

The site has seven main sections: Introductory; History of the Turkish bath; general Turkish bath Topics (e.g. caricatures and cartoons, hydropathy, the earliest photos of Turkish baths); some Turkish bath Personalities; Turkish bath Companies; Turkish bath Directory (listing more than 600 establishments opened between 1856 and the 1970s, with brief articles about an increasing number of them); and Charivari (a collection of short items on a variety of subjects).

In addition there are many hundreds of illustrations in both thumbnail and enlarged versions, together with footnotes, bibliography, illustrations index, glossary, and two-way acknowledgments. There is also a listing of Victorian and Victorian-style Turkish baths that are still open (11 in 2025), with contact numbers and addresses. The site is searchable and is updated and augmented regularly.

Selected by Encyclopædia Britannica…

The website was chosen by the editors of Encyclopædia Britannica as a Britannica iGuide site.

The Britannica iGuide is basically the Britannica's directory of the Web’s best sites as determined by their editors. Each year, they 'review and then handpick websites' that relate to one or more of their topics and 'are found to be of top quality'. They then present links to these iGuide sites alongside their own content which, in the entries for Turkish baths, Islamic baths, and Sauna, actually have a number of errors.

However, when one of their members searches on a topic within their online encyclopaedia that is also relevant to our site, they not only present Britannica information, but also provide a link for that topic to our site.

Websites are not submitted to Britannica but are independently selected.

…and included in the UK Web Archive

The UK Web Archive comprises websites originating in the UK that publish research and that reflect the diversity of lives, interests and activities throughout the UK. Because websites are revisited and snapshots ("instances") are taken at regular intervals, readers can see how a website evolves over time. The archive is free to view, and accessed directly from the Web itself.

This page last updated 22 September 2025