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The Royal Pump Room is a Grade II * listed building in Harrogate, North Yorkshire, England. Today it houses the town's museum – operated by Harrogate Borough Council. It was formerly a spa water pump house. It is located in Crown Place in the western part of Harrogate town centre, opposite the town's Valley Gardens park. It is bounded by two streets which are Crescent Road and Royal Parade. Today, the Pump Room consists of both the original 1842 stone rotunda and a glazed annexe which was opened in 1913.〔 The Pump Room offered guests of the town an all weather facility where they could drink sulphur water which was pumped on site from a natural spring known as the ''Old Sulphur Well''. The building also had a social element to it as it provided guests with a place to meet friends and get to know others. ==The museum== The Pump Room, and its later Annexe, were renovated in the early 1950s and it first opened as the new town museum in 1953.〔 Today The Royal Pump Room Museum is owned and operated by Harrogate Borough Council. The museum underwent extensive renovations between 1985 and 1987. During the work many features of the buildings including the main building and Annexe's copper roof were restored. In addition, the ''Old Sulphur Well's'' wellhead and the surviving original water serving counter were restored. The 1980s overhaul also created new exhibition areas and improved the on-site facilities. The majority of the museum tells the story of Harrogate as a spa and a centre for rest and recuperation. The council-owned collection now consists of approximately 20,000 items. The first donations and endowments came from local private collections and some items were first donated to Harrogate Corporation in the 1850s. Amongst the exhibits relating to Harrogate as a spa town are a number of recreated treatment rooms using salvaged original fixtures. These dioramas recreate the Hydrotherapy facilities, such as the Vichy bath rooms that were to be found in the nearby Royal Baths. Visitors can also see a wheeled mahogany bath which was once used for giving sulphurous peat baths. It was discovered intact during the 1970s despite being left abandoned for many years and buried near the site of The Royal Baths. The museum's 19th century Bath chair was still used by bath chair proprietor Mr Robinson until he retired in 1931. These wheeled covered chairs were once a common sight in 19th century Harrogate and they were even fairly common in the 1920s.. Bath chairs could be hired by guests from a rank of chairs and then bath chair men would push visitors from the rank to the various hotels and spa buildings. Recently a number of glass Hamilton style bottle - often known as ‘torpedo’ bottles - which all bare the inscription "bottled at the Royal Pump Room, Harrogate", were donated to the museum. Very few of these unusually shaped Victorian bottles have survived. They now form part of the display of the Pump Room's bottling room. This display serves as a reminder that there was a wider social and economic significance of the Pump Room. Strong Sulphur Water was once bottled and exported as medicinal spring water for consumption throughout the country. The museum also regularly displays a selection of period costumes from its sizeable and historically significant collection of clothing. In 2014, dresses from the museum's collections appeared on show in the ''Classical Dress Timeless Style'' exhibition which explored the influence of fashions of Ancient Greece and other aspects of the Classical World on dress makers from the 19th and 20th centuries. Another important element of the museum's displays are artefacts from the Ancient World. The museum is noted for its Ancient Egyptian and Ancient Greek artefacts which were collected by local antiquarians such as Robert Ogden and the Kent family of Tatefield Hall which is located near Beckwithshaw. The Egyptology collection includes a well-preserved sarcophagus, a unique cartonnage mask of Anubis, Stele gravestones, pre-dynastic pottery and other artefacts from later periods of Ancient Egypt. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Royal Pump Room, Harrogate」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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