Harrogate, Yorkshire

High up in Harrogate 3

Harrogate’s Royal Hall, my third striking skyline structure in the Yorkshire spa town, actually has three towers topping its entrance front, a rather squat square one in the middle and two round ones, one at each end. I like the design of the circular end towers – they’re actually quite plain, but the ring of windows offers ventilation, light – and, presumably, could be illuminated at night too, to add interest to the evening skyline.

This large building fulfilled several functions, as hinted by its original name, still carved into the face: Kursaal. If you look up the word ‘kursaal’ in a dictionary, you’ll find it defined as ‘a public room at a spa’. The word comes from the German, and is made up of words for ‘cure’ and ‘hall’. But curative functions were far form the only ones in most kursaals – balls, entertainments, theatrical performances, those were the kinds of things that might take place there, and today buildings known as kursaals are given over to all kinds of uses, cinemas and theatres being the most common, although the most famous kursaal, the one at Southend-on-Sea, is the main building of an amusement park and was designed to house a range of activities from balls to billiards.

The Kursaal at Harrogate houses a large theatre and performance auditorium. This is surrounded by an ambulatory, a space around which people could stroll and socialise, not the least important function of the building. You could also take the waters here. This multitude of functions, and the building’s size, made it an important one for Harrogate when it was erected in 1903. A competition was organised to find the best design, and well known theatrical architect Frank Matcham was hired to assess the entries and act as consulting architect. He chose a design by an architect called Robert Beale. However, the council judged that Beale’s design wasn’t entirely practical – it couldn’t be built with the available budget – and Matcham was asked to revise the designs. It’s said that the final result owes more to Matcham than Beale.

Matcham is best known for his theatre interiors, which are typically highly ornate and admirably practical. The Royal Hall is certainly both of those things – its highly decorative auditorium is looking good after a lengthy restoration in 2000–2008, and its entrance front is certainly inviting and striking. Like my other Harrogate towers, those of the Royal Hall pinpoint a building that’s both interesting to look at and an asset to the town.

 

Harrogate, Yorkshire

High up in Harrogate 2

For the second in my trio of Harrogate towers (all of them from the town’s heyday at the end of the 19th century), I’ve chosen the Westminster Shopping Arcade. When this was built in 1898, shopping arcades were enjoying something of a golden age. The Victorians loved arcades, because they gave pedestrians an escape route from the noise, smell, and bustle of the streets. By presenting themselves as elegant or exclusive, arcades shunned the lower classes and did their best to keep out anyone who might be a pickpocket. Middle-class and upper-class shoppers felt safe and able to shop and window-shop in comfort and at ease. 

An arcade was an interesting challenge for an architect. Inside there would be elegant shopfronts (think rich, dark woods, gilded lettering), and a well-lit central walkway (often achieved with an iron and glass roof). But outside? The frontage was often quite small, and the challenge was to make it look at once inviting and upmarket. Norwich’s Royal Arcade (blogged long ago here) is a small masterpiece in this regard, with its curving frontage and colourful tiles. The architect of the Westminster Arcade, perhaps inspired by the name, with its hint of the Houses of Parliament, went for a faux late-medieval look – stone walls, vaguely Gothic (or Tudor Gothic) windows, battlements, protruding corner turrets, and a wooden ‘belfry’ topped with a pointed spire-like roof. Quite a lot of care was given to the details of the belfry. Openings, shafts, crenellations, and the pattern of the roof slates and leadwork are all designed with care, and the whole thing is topped with a wrought-iron crown and finial, a detail seen on several buildings in these parts. No doubt few shoppers even glanced at all this detail once they’d got used to the building. But it turns what could be an anonymous plain frontage into something memorable. It’s an entertaining addition to Harrogate’s varied skyline and well worth an upward glance.

Harrogate, Yorkshire

High up in Harrogate 1

Although Harrogate was established as a spa by the early-18th century, it had its great boom in the late-19th century, when it became a favoured resort of the upper classes from Britain and abroad. This boom is reflected in the town’s architecture, with various grand buildings put up for the benefit of the rich who frequented the place, and for the profit of the locals – improved spa facilities, theatres, shops, all featured. Many of these buildings were architecturally ornate, and one way for a building to make its mark in this hilly town of dramatic prospects and skylines was for it to incorporate at least one tower. When you walk around Harrogate and look up, the chances are that one of these towers will punctuate the view.

This one is a wonderfully effective piece of architectural advertising. Stained glass lettering that is designed to be lit up at night immediately alerts us to the presence of the Grand Opera House – it’s the Harrogate Theatre now, but the old name survives on the tower. The opera house opened on 13 January 1900 and was designed by Frank Tugwell, who was also the architect of Scarborough’s Futurist Theatre.

Original front-of-house fittings survive inside the building, but what particularly interested me was this tower. It’s a combination of diverse elements – a bit of an eclectic mixture – but the brick parapet, tapering slate roof, lantern with its stained glass, curvy cupola, and wrought-iron crown combine to happy effect, with just the right amount of swagger for a theatre in a prosperous town at the dawn of the famously optimistic Edwardian era.

Architecturally, the tower has another role. Drawn to the building by the lantern, one finds that the tower is actually on a corner, where two merging streets force the building into quite an acute angle.* The octagonal tower, made still more memorable by stone quoins and some pretty circular windows on the upper floor, helps the building turn this tight corner with grace and flair. On the skyline and on the street, it’s a winning bit of Edwardian whimsy.

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* There’s a picture of the corner view here.

Harrogate, Yorkshire

Hotel town (3)

Seasoned visitors to this blog will know about my liking for three-dimensional inn signs and for swans. These two interests have collided at several places (including Wells and Leighton Buzzard†). Here they are again in Harrogate, in the form of this beautiful 3D sign, nicely posed and modelled. I don’t know how old the sign is: it stands on a post well distanced from the facade and most ‘vintage’ images of the Old Swan Hotel in Harrogate zoom in close and miss out the sign completely.

The inn itself goes back at least to 1777, but much of the current building probably dates from a remodelling during Harrogate’s boom years in the late-19th century. This was when the hotel was upgraded as the Harrogate Hydro and fitted with Turkish baths and other luxuries. Today, as the Old Swan, it looks very spruce and more welcoming than the rearing swan on its sign which, feathers up and bill at the ready, still pleases the swan-loving bystander.

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† This avian combination makes me wish that the village of Hanley Swan in Worcestershire had a Buzzard Inn; alas it does not.

Harrogate, Yorkshire

Hotel town (2)

Harrogate’s Crown Hotel, in my previous post, straddles the mid- and late-19th centuries in style, with the restrained classicism of the first period topped and tailed by the more elaborate architecture of the end of the century. The Majestic is from the very turn of the century, and isn’t just grand, but very grand. It’s huge, but the design avoids the impression of any sort of tedious uniformity because the architect, G. D. Martin, packed the facade with architectural incident – bays, balconies, fancy gables, and a great central dome.

Whether you’re in a suite with a balcony, the building seems to say, or in a smaller room up in the mansard roof, you’ll be aware that you’re sharing the experience of staying in a landmark building that makes its mark on the skyline. Placed solidly on a rise behind an expanse of greensward and beside trees and shrubs, it must make you feel that when you arrive here, you’ve really arrived.*

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* A short post, this, as some may well be for the next month or so, as I wrestle with work commitments, deadlines, and the gloom of cloudy wintry days and lengthening nights. But the photograph is enough: just look at this pile – it’s almost as wide-angle-lens-defying a monster as the vast civic buildings of Leeds.

Harrogate, Yorkshire

Hotel town

Harrogate is well supplied with large hotels, many dating to the town’s boom in the late-19th century – or even before, the spa being well established by the early-18th. One witness to the town’s earlier life as a watering places was the traveller redoubtable Celia Fiennes, who visited in 1697 and recorded that she could not force her horse to come near the ’Sulpher or Stincking Spaw, not improperly term’d’.* She tried a couple of quarts of the noxious water and found these doses to be ‘a good sort of Purge if you can hold your breath so as to drink them down’. The hotels are variously classical, Italianate, or a sort of free style with many bays, prominent gables, and mansard roofs. My photograph shows the Crown, which is in a mixture of styles, and has a long history.

Before the current building was put up, there had been a hotel here for a long time, even before the Crown was owned by the Thackwray family form 1740. Lord Byron, who stayed in 1806, was one of the best known guests, and he recorded that his beloved dog Nelson§ had to be put down after attacking a horse in the hotel’s stable yard. The Crown was very convenient for the town’s sulphur well, which only a few yards away and available to all. Joseph Thackwray, however, sunk his own private well in a building adjoining the Crown, greatly reducing the flow from the public well. There was an outcry from other innkeepers, and when a group took legal measures against him, he relented. It is said that this case actually alerted the town to the value both of its wells and of its pleasant environment generally, and so preserved the generous public green spaces that distinguish the place to this day.

In 1847 the Crown was rebuilt in the classical style, and this building remains the core of what’s there now – the 3-bay central section (pilastered, with rectangular windows), flanked by slender 1-bay side wings. This was extended in the Italianate style (bay windows, with round-topped central openings) in 1870, when the two parts were unified by building the balustered parapet across the top of the whole front. almost concealing the low hipped roof behind. There were yet further elaborations, including extensions to the sides in around 1899, including the tower visible on the right. The result is an impressive ensemble, near the centre of the town and not far from the greenery of The Stray. In short, an excellent venue for the festival† I attended two weeks ago and no doubt a fine centre for visitors who’ve been coming for hundreds of years.

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* Christopheer Morris (ed.), The Journeys of Celia Fiennes (The Cresset Press, 1947)

§ A mastiff, apparently, not the poet’s most famous dog, the Newfoundland Boatswain.

† The Raworths Harrogate Literature Festival

Harrogate, Yorkshire

Yorkshire philanthropy, Yorkshire grit

Last week I spent an enjoyable couple of days in Harrogate, speaking at the excellent Raworth’s Harrogate Literature Festival and spending a lot of time just standing and staring at the architecture. As someone who grew up Cheltenham and has a particular affection for Bath, both spa towns, I’ve always liked the spa town of Harrogate too – though I’ve not been there for years. I was struck by the stone: Harrogate is a stone town, like Bath (and unlike Cheltenham, where the buildings are predominantly stucco). But whereas Bath’s local stone is creamy limestone, the builders of Harrogate used mainly sandstone from the surrounding area, the various millstone grits with picturesque names (Follifoot Grit, Addlethorpe Grit, Upper and Lower Plompton Grit, and Libishaw Sandstone) that give the place its characteristic look. These stones vary in colour from grey to brown, and many look darker than the southern limestones typical of places like Bath. They’re also often finished less smoothly – sometimes rock-faced, sometimes with a flat face but with the chisel’s tool marks left very much visible.

The other thing that marks Harrogate out from those other two great spas is its date. In contrast to Georgian Bath and Regency Cheltenham, Harrogate came into fashion in the second half of the 19th century, so much of its architecture is Victorian. This building, for example, is of dark stone in a mix of masonry finishes – mainly rock-faced stone for the walls, with smooth ashlar around the windows and doors. The trefoiled upper windows and the clock tower with its short spire take their cue from the Gothic style, as is not unusual for for almshouses of the Victorian period. They were built in 1868 by textile manufacture George Rogers, whose business was in Bradford but who had a close connection to Harrogate and intended as houses for elderly people from either place.

Rogers's emblem of hard work, the bee and its hive, is placed above the central doorway. Bees must be in evidence, too, in the courtyard’s lovely garden, which was still showing a little colour in the late-October warmth. That garden, together with the architectural flourish of the spire, suggest that a decent environment was (and is) being valued here, not just a necessary minimum. Victorian values weren’t all bad.