Bathing cultures and the civic body
Washing in private is a recent luxury. For most of urban history it was a public activity, with architecture, staff, etiquette and politics attached.
Public bathing has been a major urban institution across many societies, from Roman thermae through the hammam of the Islamic world, the Japanese sento and onsen, the Nordic sauna and the Russian banya, to the municipal baths and wash houses built in Britain from the mid nineteenth century under enabling legislation. Their functions were social, civic and ritual as much as hygienic, and the decline of several of them tracks the arrival of domestic plumbing rather than any change in attitudes to cleanliness.
A bath house is an expensive building. It requires a water supply, a drainage system, a fuel supply, a furnace, heat resistant construction, staff and continuous maintenance. Societies do not build them casually, and the fact that so many have built them, independently and repeatedly, says that public bathing was doing something worth the expenditure.
Rome, and the scale of it
Roman bathing is the best known case and the most misunderstood, because the surviving remains are so large that they overshadow the ordinary version. The imperial thermae of Rome were enormous public complexes, and their scale is difficult to overstate: they contained not only bathing rooms at different temperatures but exercise grounds, libraries, gardens and space for socialising, and they were open to a very wide social range.
The procedure involved a sequence of rooms at rising and falling temperatures, oiling of the body, and scraping with a strigil, a curved metal implement used to remove oil, sweat and dirt together. Soap in the modern sense was not the primary agent, as noted in the essay on soap. Strigils survive in considerable numbers in museum collections and are among the most immediately legible personal objects of the ancient world.
The important point is social rather than technical. The Roman bath was where business was conducted, patronage exercised and reputations made. It was a civic institution with a hygienic function attached, not the other way round.
The hammam
The bath houses of the Islamic world developed from Roman and Byzantine precedents and elaborated them, with distinctive architecture, a well defined sequence of rooms, and an integration with religious practice that the Roman version did not have: ritual purification before prayer gives the bath a place in a structure of obligation.
The hammam has been a major civic institution across North Africa, the eastern Mediterranean, the Levant, Persia and further east, and in many places it retained functions that European bathing lost entirely: it was a place of preparation for marriage, of postnatal care, of the transaction of information between households, and of a particular kind of sociability among women in societies where other public spaces were limited to them. That last function has been widely described in the scholarship and it maps closely onto the argument made about the salon.
Sento and onsen
Japanese bathing culture makes a distinction English does not: between washing, which is done thoroughly outside the bath, and bathing, which is done in clean hot water afterwards and is for soaking rather than cleaning. The sento is the neighbourhood bath house; the onsen uses natural hot spring water and carries its own associations of travel, geology and health.
The institution has been through substantial regulatory change. Mixed bathing was restricted during the Meiji period, in a set of reforms partly driven by concern about how the practice appeared to western visitors, which is a recurring pattern worth noticing: bathing customs are unusually vulnerable to reform driven by external observation. The number of sento has declined substantially with the spread of domestic bathrooms, which is a plumbing story rather than a cultural one.
The British municipal bath
Britain's public bathing story runs differently and is worth telling properly, because it is one of the more impressive pieces of Victorian civic effort and is largely forgotten.
Enabling legislation from the mid nineteenth century allowed local authorities to provide baths and wash houses, and a great many did. The dual name matters: these buildings washed bodies and clothes, in separate facilities, because in dense urban housing neither could be done adequately at home. The laundry side is routinely omitted from accounts of them, and it was often the busier half.
The motive was public health rather than pleasure, and the context is the sanitary reform movement described elsewhere in this magazine. The buildings that survive are frequently now swimming pools, which is a partial preservation: the swimming bath was often one facility among several, and the slipper baths, individual bathing cubicles, and the laundry have generally gone.
Public bathing did not decline because people stopped caring about cleanliness. It declined because the plumbing came indoors.
- The claim
- The Victorians built public baths because working people did not want to wash, and had to be forced into cleanliness by their betters.
- Where it appears to come from
- A caricature that draws on genuine strands of nineteenth century reform rhetoric, which was often moralising and condescending, and on twentieth century critiques of that rhetoric. It is repeated in casual accounts of the sanitary movement.
- What is actually established
- Established: sanitary reform rhetoric was frequently moralising and class inflected, and reformers often described the poor in unflattering terms. Established: baths and wash houses were built under enabling legislation in response to urban public health conditions. Not established: that the population resisted washing. The usage figures for these facilities were substantial, waiting was common, and the wash house side in particular was heavily used, which is the behaviour of people who wanted the facility and lacked one at home. The obstacle was infrastructure, not willingness.
The Victorian Turkish bath
A curious footnote deserves its own paragraph. From the 1850s a hot air bathing establishment, marketed as the Turkish bath, was promoted in Britain and Ireland, championed by the diplomat and writer David Urquhart, who had encountered bathing culture in the Ottoman empire. The version built was not in fact the hammam but a dry hot air bath closer to a Roman model, and it spread widely, appearing in cities, spas, hotels and even in some institutions.
It is a fine example of a cultural import being reshaped in transit and then sold back as authentic, a pattern this magazine encounters repeatedly and treats at length in the essay on revivals.
What was lost
Domestic plumbing is an unambiguous good and nobody is arguing otherwise. But it is worth being clear about what it replaced, because the replacement was not like for like.
The private bathroom delivers hygiene. It does not deliver the other things the bath house delivered: regular unstructured contact with neighbours, a public space with no requirement to spend beyond the entry fee, an institution that mixed social classes, or a setting in which bodies of all ages and conditions were ordinarily visible to one another. That last one may be the most consequential loss. In a society where the only bodies most people see are their own and those in photographs, the sense of what a normal body looks like is formed from a very narrow and heavily edited sample, which connects directly to the retouching essay. The countries where communal bathing remains ordinary are, on the whole, not the countries where this particular anxiety is loudest.
Where to look
Readers who want to go further should start with the holdings themselves rather than with summaries of them. The British Museum, collection and the Wellcome Collection both publish catalogue and research material relevant to this article. Both links are given for reference only. Neither institution has been assessed by us, neither has any connection to this magazine, and nothing here is an endorsement of any organisation.
Questions readers send us
What was a strigil?
A curved metal implement used in Greek and Roman bathing to scrape oil, sweat and dirt from the skin. The body was oiled, then scraped, then rinsed. Soap in the modern sense was not the primary cleansing agent, and strigils survive in large numbers in museum collections.
What is the difference between a sento and an onsen?
A sento is a neighbourhood public bath house using heated ordinary water. An onsen uses natural hot spring water and carries associations with travel, geology and health. In both, washing is done thoroughly before entering the bath, which is for soaking rather than cleaning.
What were baths and wash houses?
Municipal buildings, provided under enabling legislation in Britain from the mid nineteenth century, containing facilities for washing bodies and for washing clothes. The laundry side was often the busier and is usually omitted from accounts of them. Many survive as swimming pools.
Why did public bathing decline in Britain?
Principally because domestic bathrooms became standard. It was a plumbing change rather than a change in attitudes, and the same pattern is visible in the decline of the Japanese sento over the second half of the twentieth century.
Was the Victorian Turkish bath actually Turkish?
Not really. The establishments promoted in Britain and Ireland from the 1850s were dry hot air baths closer to a Roman model than to the hammam, developed after encounters with Ottoman bathing culture and marketed under the Turkish name. It is a clear case of a cultural import being reshaped in transit.
- British Museum, collection Strigils, oil flasks and the material culture of ancient bathing.
- Wellcome Collection History of hygiene, sanitary reform and public health.
- The National Archives Records of baths and wash houses legislation and local authority provision.
- Science Museum Group Water supply, plumbing and public health technology.
- Victoria and Albert Museum Architecture, tiles and the decorative arts of bathing establishments.
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