Sights in Harrogate
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Royal Pump Room Museum
The ritual of visiting a spa town to 'take the waters' as a health cure became fashionable in the 19th century and peaked during the Edwardian era in the years before WWI. Charles Dickens visited Harrogate in 1858 and described it as 'the queerest place, with the strangest people in it, leading the oddest lives of dancing, newspaper-reading and dining'; sounds quite pleasant, really.
You can learn all about the history of Harrogate as a spa town in the ornate Royal Pump Room, built in 1842 over the most famous of the sulphur springs. It gives an insight into how the phenomenon shaped the town and records the illustrious visitors that it attracted; at the end you get the ch…
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Mercer Art Gallery
Another surviving spa building, the Promenade Room, is now home to this ele- gant gallery, a stately space that hosts constantly changing exhibitions of visual arts.
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Harlow Carr Botanical Gardens
It's a huge green thumbs-up to Harrogate's gardeners - the Harlow Carr Botanical Gardens has some of the most beautiful flora you'll ever see. Indulge the flower-fanatic within and get yourself to this northern showpiece of the Royal Horticultural Society.
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Turkish Baths
If drinking the water isn't enough, you can immerse yourself in it at Harrogate's fabulously tiled Turkish Baths. This mock- Moorish facility is gloriously Victorian and offers a range of watery delights – hot rooms, steam rooms, plunge pools and so on; a visit should last around 1½ hours. There's a complicated schedule of opening hours that are by turns single-sex and mixed – call or check online for details.
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Montpellier Quarter
The most attractive part of town is the Montpellier Quarter, overlooking Prospect Gardens between Crescent Rd and Montpellier Hill. It's an area of pedestrianised streets lined with restored 19th-century buildings that are now home to art galleries, antique shops, fashion boutiques, cafes and restaurants − an upmarket annex to the main shopping area around Oxford St and Cambridge St.
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Gardens
A huge green thumbs-up to Harrogate's gardeners; the town has some of the most beautiful public gardens in England. Flower fanatics should make for the Harlow Carr Botanical Gardens,the northern showpiece of the Royal Horticultural Society. The gardens are 1.5 miles southwest of town; take the B6162 Otley Rd, or walk through the Pine Woods southwest of the Valley Gardens.
Much closer to the town centre are the Valley Gardens, overlooked by the vast, glass-domed Sun Pavilion, built in 1933. The nearby bandstand houses concerts on Sunday afternoons from June to August.
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