[1][nb 1] It lies close to Cheshire to the west and Staffordshire to the south, on the edge of the Peak District National Park.

This Stone Age settlement, a scheduled monument, was rediscovered in 1984, with remains of a Mesolithic timber roundhouse and Neolithic longhouses.

From 1153 the town was within the Duchy of Lancaster's Crown estate, close to the Royal Forest of the Peak on the Fairfield side of the River Wye.

[7] Built on the River Wye, and overlooked by Axe Edge Moor, Buxton became a spa town for its geothermal spring,[8] which gushes at a steady 28 °C.

The spring waters are piped to St Ann's Well, a shrine since medieval times at the foot of The Slopes, opposite the Crescent and near the town centre.

[12] According to John Jones of Derby, author of Buxtone's Bathes Benefyte (1572), the visitors to Shrewsbury's "goodly house" enjoyed a game of table bowls known as trou madame.

[7][16][17] Prisoner of war camps at Ladmanlow and Peak Dale were established in 1917 to supply workers for the local limestone quarries.

[18] RAF Harpur Hill became an underground bomb-storage facility during World War II and the country's largest munitions dump.

[25] The early settlement (of which only the parish church of St Anne, built in 1625, remains) was largely made of limestone,[citation needed] while the present buildings of locally quarried sandstone, mostly date from the late 18th century.

[nb 1] Buxton's elevation makes it cooler and wetter than surrounding towns, with a daytime temperature typically about 2 °C lower than Manchester.

It was owned by George Talbot, 6th Earl of Shrewsbury, who with his wife, Bess of Hardwick, acted as the "gaolers" of Mary, Queen of Scots, who came to Buxton several times to take the waters, her final visit being in 1584.

[34] The Grade I listed Crescent was built in 1780–1784 for the 5th Duke of Devonshire, as part of his effort to turn Buxton into a fashionable spa town.

Modelled on Bath's Royal Crescent, it was designed by architect John Carr, together with the neighbouring irregular octagon and colonnade of the Great Stables.

The Thermal Baths, closed in 1963 and at risk of demolition, were restored and converted into a shopping arcade by conservation architects Derek Latham and Company.

Architectural artist Brian Clarke contributed to the refurbishment;[35][36] his scheme, designed in 1984 and completed in 1987, was for a landmark modern artwork,[37] a barrel-vaulted modern stained glass ceiling to enclose the former baths[38] — at the time the largest stained glass window in the British Isles — creating an atrial space for what became the Cavendish Arcade.

[42] Nearby stands the imposing monument to Samuel Turner (1805–1878), treasurer of the Devonshire Hospital and Buxton Bath Charity, built in 1879 and accidentally lost for the latter part of the 20th century during construction work, before being found and restored in 1994.

[46] The 122-room Palace Hotel, also designed by Currey and built in 1868, is a prominent feature of the Buxton skyline on the hill above the railway station.

In 2010, during a visit of Pope Benedict XVI to the UK, it was cut down as a protest against a long history of child abuse at the Catholic St Williams School in Market Weighton, Yorkshire.

Lost buildings of Buxton include grand spa hotels, the Midland Railway station, the Picture House cinema and Cavendish Girls' Grammar School.

The Buxton Fringe features drama, music, dance, comedy, poetry, art exhibitions and films around the town.

[62][63] Buxton Museum and Art Gallery holds local artefacts, geological and archaeological samples (including the William Boyd Dawkins collection) and 19th and 20th-century paintings, with work by Brangwyn, Chagall, Chahine and their contemporaries.

[65] Buxton's Well Dressing Festival in the week up to the second Saturday in July has been running in its current form since 1840, to mark the provision of fresh water to the high point of the town's marketplace.

Buxton's economy covers tourism, retail, quarrying, scientific research, light industry and mineral water bottling.

[67] Surrounded by the Peak District National Park, it offers a range of cultural events; tourism is a major industry, with over a million visitors to Buxton each year.

Buxton is the main centre for overnight accommodation in the Peak District, with over 64 per cent of the park's visitor bed space.

[93] The hillside round Solomon's Temple is a popular local bouldering venue with many small outcrops giving problems mainly in the lower grades.

The trackbed of the Manchester, Buxton, Matlock and Midland Junction Railway has, in part, been used as a walking and cycling path called the Monsal Trail.

Peak Rail, a preserved railway group, has restored the section from Rowsley South to Matlock; it has long-term ambitions to reopen it through to Buxton.

The High Peak Transpeak service offers an hourly link southwards to Taddington, Bakewell, Matlock, Belper and Derby.

[105] A series of four recent novels by Sarah Ward – In Bitter Chill (2015), A Deadly Thaw (2017), A Patient Fury (2018) and The Shrouded Path (2019) – feature the fictional town of Bampton, which the author states "is partly based on Buxton with its Georgian architecture, Bakewell, a well-heeled market town... and Cromford with its canal and fantastic industrial heritage.