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Hammams in the Western world

Aside from Al-Andalus (the mainly Spanish and Portuguese parts of Europe which were Muslim ruled until 1492) modern Western Europe has no legacy of historic hammams. Nevertheless, derivatively named Hummums existed in London's Covent Garden in the first half of the 18th century. For some part of that time, sweating and bathing facilities were located there, and at others, coffee houses, hotels, and houses of ill repute (bagnios) merged with, or replaced them, until a major fire destroyed them in 1768. But there have been no historic hammam structures in London which could have been considered part of the Islamic hammam tradition.

The British Isles in the 19th century

Madden in Syrian Costume

Edward William Lane

English readers in the 19th century were not ignorant about the existence of hammams and could read contemporary accounts of what they were and how travellers were fascinated by them. Authors such as Richard Robert Madden (in 1829), Edward William Lane (in 1836), and, in lighter vein, William Makepeace Thackeray (in 1846) had described them in their books.

Thackeray wrote with the intention of entertaining us by mocking what those people have over there. But even the scholarly works of Madden and Lane were educating us about their customs with the implication that they were strange customs. Neither scholar thought to suggest any practical lessons on personal hygiene which their readers might learn from these accounts. Two authors tried to rectify this omission.

In 1828, a year before Madden wrote his book, an anonymous, still unknown author self-published a limited edition of 250 copies of a quite different work, Strictures on the personal cleanliness of the English, with a description of the hammams of the Turks, &c.. It was distributed by the radical publisher of The Republican, Richard Carlile, who had realised that in Strictures the author was not denigrating the Turks; on the contrary, he was positioning them as a people to be emulated, by describing customs which his readers should adopt themselves. The author wrote that he had wanted,

to erect baths at the expense of government in different parts of London, after the manner of the Roman thermæ, publicly endowed like hospitals for the use of the people,

and that in 1818 he had unsuccessfully tried to interest George III in his project.

The second author was David Urquhart, a Scottish diplomat and sometime MP for Stafford, whose travel book, The Pillars of Hercules, was an account of his travels in Morocco and Spain in 1848. Two chapters described the hammams of Morocco and Turkey in considerable detail, and Urquhart became an advocate of what were known in the English-speaking world as "Turkish baths" because those most often described in travel books were located in Turkey and the Ottoman Empire.

The book had no direct impact on the construction of a hammam until it was read in 1856 by an Irish physician and hydropathist, Dr Richard Barter. Barter, who was already using the vapour bath cabinet therapeutically at St Ann(e)'s (his hydropathic establishment near Cork), saw immediately that the bath described by Urquhart was a major improvement on this. He contacted Urquhart and offered him men, money, and materials if he would visit St Ann's, and build one for use by his patients.

This beehive-shaped bath was unsuccessful because although Urquhart was experienced in using hammams he had no experience of building them. It had not been possible to heat the air to the required high temperature. This was the only documented 19th century attempt to build a hammam in Western Europe and the attempt was abandoned.

Instead, Dr Barter sent his architect (also named Richard Barter but unrelated to him) to Rome to study how the ancient thermae were built. On his return he designed and supervised the building of what has become known as the first Victorian Turkish bath—a hot-air bath using hot dry air instead of the moist air of the hammam. Barter knew from his experience with vapour baths that heat was an effective therapeutic agent, especially for complaints such as gout and rheumatism. He also knew that the human body can withstand higher temperatures when exposed to dry air rather than wet vapourous air. He called his bath 'The Improved Turkish bath'.

The following year (1857) Urquhart helped build the first such bath in Manchester. As a Turkophile, he argued strongly for calling the new bath a Turkish bath, though others unsuccessfully argued that it should be called an Anglo-Roman bath or, as in Germany and elsewhere, the Irish-Roman bath.

But all future 19th century hot-air baths in the British Isles were either based on the Roman model or, latterly, on the Russian steam bath and, later still on the Finnish sauna. After Barter's initial attempt, the hammam is not recorded as appearing again in Western Europe until after World War I.

Europe, post World War II

The second half of the 20th century saw a new, war-weary air-travelling holiday generation returned from Turkey and other countries where they discovered the hammam, not as part of a specifically Islamic culture but as what had become a significant tourist attraction.

It was not long before baths based on the appearance of the hammam, with its central room and göbek tasi (belly-stone), started appearing in European hotels, health spas, and even as standalone establishments. But the history of the modern European hammam is yet to be studied or recorded.