A domed Greek Revival pump room faces a park and lake, framed by stuccoed Regency villas on the surrounding streets.
What Pittville looks like
stands at the north end of , a colonnade of Ionic columns across its front with three stone statues set along the roofline above them. A shallow green dome caps the ground floor hall, and the cream stone front looks out over open lawns and a lake with no modern building visible behind it. Inside, a gallery runs around the hall on its own ring of columns, under the dome.
Stone steps lead down from the colonnade to a gravel forecourt, and the lawns run wide and flat on every side. Paths follow the water past a balustraded stone bridge and mature trees on both banks, with benches set along the grass.
The streets around the park carry large stuccoed villas set back behind iron railings and gravel driveways. and the streets south of the Pump Room both carry two and three storey Regency houses painted white or pale grey, with columned porches, iron balconies and tall sash windows.
Prestbury Road, Wellington Road and Albert Road meet at a circus of villas, laid out between 1839 and 1840. stands there with a round corner tower and a Doric porch, stucco over brick, built in 1840.
At on the west side, a two storey corner building holds a takeaway under a red painted shopfront, with terraced houses running either side of it. A cast iron pillar box stands at the kerb outside.
Shot in Pittville
Pittville Pump Room has played three different BBC dramas across three decades without changing its own colonnaded front. House of Eliott used it in 1991, Vanity Fair in 1998 and Father Brown more recently, each one filming the Pump Room as itself.
Three BBC dramas
The same colonnaded front recurs across three different BBC dramas spanning three decades. House of Eliott used it in 1991, Vanity Fair in 1998 and Father Brown more recently.
Father Brown
Pittville Pump Room
Pittville Pump Room appears in BBC One's Father Brown, named alongside Cheltenham Town Hall as one of the production's Regency buildings in Cheltenham. The colonnaded front and the domed hall behind it are the building playing itself rather than standing in for anywhere else. Street View
Vanity Fair, 1998
Pittville Pump Room also appears in the 1998 BBC television adaptation of Vanity Fair, filmed there alongside Cheltenham Town Hall. The novel is set in the early eighteen hundreds, close to the decade the Pump Room's own colonnade was built.
House of Eliott, 1991
Pittville Pump Room also appears in House of Eliott, a 1991 BBC series about two sisters running a nineteen twenties fashion house. The colonnaded front and the domed ground floor hall gave the production a Regency civic room to use for the show's own decade.
What Pittville can double for
Harrogate, North Yorkshire
Harrogate's Royal Pump Room is a smaller domed spa building with its own colonnaded entrance, set beside its own gardens the way Pittville's Pump Room sits against its own park. Both are freestanding Regency civic buildings with no modern structure behind them. Harrogate's dome and portico are on a smaller scale than Pittville's, so a wide establishing shot gives away the difference more than a tight frame on the entrance would. Try searching domed spa building now.
Royal Leamington Spa, Warwickshire
Leamington Spa has the same stuccoed villa streets radiating from its own spa buildings, built across the same early Regency decades. Its own Royal Pump Rooms building gives a second colonnaded civic frontage if a production needs one. Leamington's villas run to a slightly larger scale with more elaborate porticoes, so tighter frames on the stucco and iron balconies hold the match best. Try searching stuccoed Regency villa streets now.
Baden-Baden, Germany
Baden-Baden's Trinkhalle is a longer colonnaded pump room built in the same decades, fronting its own spa gardens. The scale and the painted arcade behind the columns are both bigger than anything at Pittville. The Trinkhalle's longer colonnade and painted wall behind it would need cropping tight on a single bay to match the scale of a smaller Regency pump room. Try searching colonnaded pump room now.
