Harrogate

In the Middle Ages Harrogate was little more than a place on the boundary of the township of Bilton with Harrogate, within the Royal Forest of Knaresborough. Its fortunes changed in 1571, when William Slingsby found that the water of the Tewit Well in High Harrogate resembled that of the springs at Spa in present-day Belgium. Edmund Deane's book Spadacrene Anglica, or the English Spa Fountain, publicised the waters in 1626, and further iron-rich chalybeate and sulphur springs were found in High and Low Harrogate in the 17th and 18th centuries. The two settlements grew together into the town known as "The English Spa".

When the Royal Forest of Knaresborough was enclosed under an act of 1770, 200 acres of land including the known springs were reserved as a public common, the Stray, which remains open space today, and development spread around it. Wealthy visitors seeking cures brought money to the town: the Georgian Theatre opened in 1788, the Royal Pump Room in 1842, and the council's Royal Baths, a hydrotherapy centre, in 1897. Samson Fox, mayor three years running in the 1890s, lit Parliament Street with water-gas, the first street in the world to be lit that way.

Like spa towns across Europe, Harrogate lost popularity after the First World War, and the Royal Baths wound down after losing a National Health Service contract in 1969. The town reinvented itself through conferences, exhibitions and the Great Yorkshire Showground, and as a prosperous home for commuters to Leeds and York. In 2025 it gained a new town council, which in November that year was licensed to use the borough's arms of 1884.

Harrogate's culture still grows from its spa years. The Royal Hall, a theatre designed by Frank Matcham, and the Royal Pump Room museum stand by Crescent Gardens, the Victorian Turkish baths in the Royal Baths are still in use, and Harrogate Theatre opened as the Grand Opera House in January 1900. Taking afternoon tea at Bettys, founded in the town in 1919, is a ritual for visitors and residents alike.

The town is a festival centre. Harrogate International Festivals, one of the North of England's leading arts organisations, runs the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival and its Crime Novel of the Year award, along with literature and music festivals. The Great Yorkshire Show, the largest agricultural show in England, fills the showground every July, and the twice-yearly Harrogate Flower Shows suit a town of parks and gardens, from the Valley Gardens and the Stray to RHS Harlow Carr.

Local life has a reputation for comfort and calm: from 2013 to 2015 surveys by a property website named Harrogate the happiest place to live in the United Kingdom. Harrogate Town play league football, with a long rivalry with Harrogate Railway Athletic, and cricket is played in the local leagues.

Harrogate had about 73,600 people at the 2011 census, and the built-up area taking in Knaresborough about 89,000. It is one of the most prosperous towns in the North, with expensive terraced houses lining the Stray and wealthy districts such as Wheatlands to the south.

The economy rests on conferences and exhibitions at the Harrogate Convention Centre and the Great Yorkshire Showground, on tourism, shopping and services, and on locally based firms: Bettys and Taylors, which blends Yorkshire Tea, launched in 1977, and the bottlers of Harrogate Spring Water. The Army Foundation College and RAF Menwith Hill lie to the west. Many residents commute to Leeds and York on the half-hourly trains.

The town centre is busy with shoppers on Cambridge Street and Oxford Street, and Parliament Street and the Montpellier Quarter have the designer shops. Residents live in districts such as Starbeck to the east, Woodlands to the south-east, Wheatlands, Pannal and Hornbeam Park, several with their own station or frequent buses. The Stray is jealously guarded: if any part is taken for road widening it must be replaced elsewhere.

Bettys is Harrogate's best-known food institution. The Swiss confectioner Frederick Belmont opened the first Bettys Café Tea Room here in 1919, and the company, which bought the tea and coffee merchants Taylors of Harrogate in 1962, now runs tea rooms across Yorkshire, including one at RHS Harlow Carr, as well as a cookery school. Its fat rascal, a plump, fruity scone introduced in 1983, became its best-known bakery product, and Taylors' Yorkshire Tea, launched in 1977, is one of the country's best-known brews.

The waters themselves were once the town's most famous drink. Harrogate spa water contains iron, sulphur and common salt, and visitors in the 17th and 18th centuries drank the chalybeate, or iron-rich, waters as a health treatment; the sulphur water was later served in the Royal Pump Room. Harrogate Spring Water, bottled in the town, is sold internationally today.

For eating out, the Montpellier Quarter has cafés and restaurants among its boutiques, and West Park and Cold Bath Road, facing the Stray and the Valley Gardens, have restaurants and pubs. The Great Yorkshire Show each July is a showcase for the county's farm produce.