Nantwich, United Kingdom

Nantwich Castle was built at the crossing of the Weaver before 1180, probably near where the Crown Inn now stands. Although nothing remains of the castle above ground, it affected the town's layout. During the medieval period, Nantwich was the most important salt town and probably the second most important settlement in the county after Chester. By the 14th century, it was holding a weekly cattle market at the end of what is now Beam Street, and it was also important for its tanning industry centred in Barker Street.

A fire in December 1583 destroyed most of the town to the east of the Weaver. Elizabeth I contributed funds to the town's rebuilding and made an England-wide appeal for support for the rebuilding fund which thereby received funds from many successful medieval towns, including Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk. The rebuilding occurred rapidly and followed the plan of the destroyed town. Beam Street was so renamed to reflect the fact that timber (including wood from Delamere Forest) to rebuild the town was transported along it. A plaque marking the 400th anniversary of the fire and of Nantwich's rebuilding was unveiled by the Duke of Gloucester on 20 September 1984.

From the time of the Henrician Reformation, the town had trouble finding good Protestant preachers. An example of the problem was Stephen Jerome, a puritanical preacher, who in 1625 nonetheless tried to rape one of his maidservants, Margaret Knowsley. Rumours of this spread across the town, eventually leading to Knowsley's imprisonment and public shaming in 1627. A few years later, Jerome went to Ireland to continue his preaching career.

During the English Civil War Nantwich declared for Parliament and was besieged several times by Royalist forces. A final six-week siege was lifted after a Parliamentary victory in the Battle of Nantwich on 26 January 1644. This has been re-enacted as "Holly Holy Day" on every anniversary since 1973 by Sealed Knot, an educational charity. The name is taken from commemorative sprigs of holly worn by townsfolk in caps or on clothing in the years after the battle.

The salt industry peaked in the mid-16th century, with about 400 salt houses in 1530, but had almost died out by the end of the 18th century; the last salt house closed in the mid-19th century. Nikolaus Pevsner considered the salt-industry decline to have been critical in preserving the town's historic buildings. The last tannery closed in 1974. The town's location on the London–Chester road meant that Nantwich began to serve the needs of travellers in medieval times. This trade declined in the 19th century with the opening of Telford's road from London to Holyhead, which offered a faster route to Wales, and later with the Grand Junction Railway, which bypassed the town.

The presence of a watermill south of Nantwich Bridge was noted in 1228 and again about 1363, through the cutting of a mill race or leat and creation of an upstream weir. The resulting Mill Island was ascribed to the 16th century, possibly after the original mill was destroyed in the 1583 Great Fire of Nantwich.

In the mid-17th century, the mill was acquired by local landowners, the Cholmondeleys, who retained it until the 1840s. Originally a corn mill, it became a cotton mill (Bott's Mill) from 1789 to 1874, but reverted to being a corn mill and was recorded as such on the Ordnance Survey First Edition map of Nantwich in 1876. A turbine was installed in about 1890 to replace the water wheel.

The mill was demolished in the 1970s after a fire and then landscaped, with further stabilisation of the mill foundations in 2008. Today it forms part of a riverside park area. Proposals, so far unfollowed, have been made for small-scale hydropower generation using the mill race. Nantwich Mill Hydro Generation Ltd was incorporated in April 2009, but dormant in December 2016.

Nantwich's brine springs were used for spa or hydrotherapy purposes at two locations: the central Snow Hill swimming pool inaugurated in 1883, where the open-air brine pool is still in use, and the Brine Baths Hotel, standing in 70 acres (28 ha) of parkland south of the town from the 1890s to the mid-20th century. The hotel was originally a mansion, Shrewbridge Hall, built for Michael Bott (owner of Nantwich Mill) in 1828. It was bought by Nantwich Brine and Medicinal Baths Company in 1883, extended and opened as a hotel in 1893, with "a well-appointed suite of brine and medicinal baths," – also described as the "strongest saline baths in the world". These were used to treat patients with ailments that included gout, rheumatism, sciatica and neuritis, using two suites of baths.

The hotel's grounds included gardens, tennis courts, a nine-hole golf course and a bowling green. The last survives today as the Nantwich Park Road Bowling Club founded in 1906.