Spa Pump Room, Hockley

The Spa Pump Room is a Grade II listed, early Victorian building in Hockley, Essex.

Letitia, a chronic asthmatic, found relief in drinking the water and declared it to be medicinal; they renamed their cottage Hockley Spa Lodge.

In order to capitalise on their discovery, and to emulate the kind of success that spas in Bath and Royal Tunbridge Wells had achieved, they sought advice from a local businessman, William Summersall, who later became the manager of the spa, on how to build a pumping room to access larger amounts of water for the wider public.

[9] The Pump Room opened for business on 8 June 1843, a ticket only occasion[10] that was marked by a banquet meal for 150 of the town's gentry and their city acquaintances.

[5] Despite Robert Clay's death in 1843,[11][n 1] the business flourished and the water became so much in demand that it was sent to a depot in Cripplegate, London, where it was bottled and distributed to other countries.

[15][16] The author and historian Phillis Embry, in her 1997 book British Spas from 1815 to the Present Day, records the Pump Room's use as a baptist chapel in 1857,[17] a function that lasted until at least 1871, noted that year in an article for the East London Observer.

[17] In 1896 The Essex Herald reported the attempts being made by a syndicate to recommission the well and to put the building back into use as a pump room.