The springs were discovered in 1786 by William Abbotts and Benjamin Satchwell beneath the floor of a cottage near the parish church. The water tasted unpleasantly of brine - sodium chloride, mostly, with traces of iron - and Georgian England promptly decided it must therefore be medicinal. Within a generation, what had been the obscure village of Leamington Priors became one of the great Regency resorts of inland Britain, ranked with Bath and Cheltenham in fashion if not yet in scale. The Royal Pump Room opened in 1814 with its grand colonnade overlooking the river. Visitors took the waters internally and bathed in heated versions of them, believed cures for rheumatism, gout, paralysis, and the vague complaints of the leisured rich. Queen Victoria visited as a princess in 1830 and again as queen in 1838; the latter visit earned the town its Royal prefix, making Royal Leamington Spa one of only three English towns permitted that title.

What the springs actually produced was architecture. A new town was laid out north of the river on a generous grid, with broad streets, white stucco Regency terraces, and the long ceremonial sweep of the Parade running from the Pump Room northward through the heart of the new development. Jephson Gardens opened in 1846 as a memorial to Dr Henry Jephson, the physician who had built much of the town's medical reputation. The Pump Room Gardens, the parish church of All Saints rebuilt in Gothic Revival grandeur, and the Theatre Royal followed. Where Bath had hot springs and a Roman pedigree, Leamington had only cold brine and an empty field - but the field was levelled into one of England's most coherent planned Regency townscapes, almost all of it raised between roughly 1810 and 1850.

The medical fashion that built Leamington faded by the late nineteenth century. The Pump Room continued to dispense its waters, but the season-ticket clientele who had filled the town's lodging houses thinned, and Leamington reinvented itself as a respectable residential and commuter town - a transition it has been making, more or less successfully, ever since. The old swimming hall of the baths is now Leamington Library. The Pump Room itself houses the town's art gallery and museum, free to enter, displaying a collection that includes works by Stanley Spencer and Lowry. The waters can no longer be drunk: they were quietly cut off in 1990 after concerns about their safety. The Parade remains the spine of the town, its Royal Priors shopping centre hidden behind the original Regency facades on its eastern side.

Of all the things Leamington produced, lawn tennis is the most lasting. Gem and Perera's club codified the rules - the dimensions of the court, the height of the net, the system of scoring - that the All England Croquet Club at Wimbledon would adopt with modifications in 1877 when it added its own tennis championship. A blue plaque on Avenue Road marks the lawn where Perera first played. The town also gave birth, less famously, to one of the more curious careers in twentieth-century literature: Aleister Crowley was born here in 1875, the son of a brewing-fortune father who had become a Plymouth Brethren preacher. Crowley grew up to call himself the wickedest man in the world. Leamington declines, with some dignity, to claim him.

Modern Leamington is a town of about 51,000 people that lives partly on its proximity to Coventry and Birmingham and partly on the seasonal influx of students from the University of Warwick - which, despite its name, sits closer to Coventry than to either Leamington or Warwick itself. The town has become a quiet centre of British video game development since the 1980s, with Codemasters and others establishing studios in the area. Park Street and Regent Street host independent shops; Bedford Street fills with bars and restaurants at night. Jephson Gardens still runs down to the Leam, the river that gave its name to the town a thousand years before anyone thought to look beneath the cottage floor.