From Wiki Harrogate spa water contains iron, sulphur and common salt. The town became known as The E

We had arranged an overnight stay in Harrogate because we used to go there regularly every year to the Institute of Housing Annual Conference. This was an annual event when Housing professionals from all over the country would get to together to enjoy corporate hospitality, drink too much and generally collectively misbehave dollar car rental coupon – and to go to some conference lectures of course.
We drove past Knaresborough which is an interesting place noted mostly dollar car rental coupon for the tourist attraction Mother Shipton’s Cave  which claims to be the oldest visitor attraction in England and where visitors leave odd items of clothing, dollar car rental coupon like a tie or a bowler hat or a bonnet and the drip, drip of the limestone infused water eventually calcifies the item and turns it to stone. It takes a long time of course and I have always wondered what the point is of leaving something that you can never go back and collect within your own lifetime! We had both been there before so we didn’t feel as though we were missing anything today.
Harrogate is a nice town. It is consistently voted as one of the best places to live in the UK and in 2014 a poll of forty-thousand people found that Harrogate was the happiest dollar car rental coupon place to live in the United Kingdom for the second year running. Interestingly, even with obscenely dollar car rental coupon spiraling property values, the ten most unhappy places were all in Greater London.
And Harrogate is posh, seriously posh. It is the only place north of the M25 where the residents unashamedly (and with some justification) consider themselves to be socially superior to people in the South in places like Surrey and Hertfordshire.  When I was a boy I can remember my Grandmother speaking dollar car rental coupon about Harrogate even then as though it was a sort of mystical Shangri-La!
After we had settled in we sat in our room and watched the sky cloud over, white, grey and then black and then it rained and I remembered that this is another good reason why I generally prefer to go to Spain or Greece for a few days away.
Kim went to a mini-market that we remembered around the corner and I settled down to some research.  Two pieces of trivia lodged in my brain.  In 1926 the author Agatha Christie mysteriously went missing from her home in Berkshire and was discovered ten days later in Harrogate at the Old Swan Hotel where she was staying under an assumed name.  So, posh person from Sunningdale chooses to disappear for a while in posh Harrogate!
Secondly, and this is my favourite, in 1982 the twenty-seventh Eurovision Song Contest was held and broadcast from the Harrogate Conference Centre.  I had time to do this research dollar car rental coupon because Kim took longer than expected and when she came back she reported that the shop had gone and was now a block of posh flats!
After a couple of hours it still hadn’t stopped raining but we were getting dollar car rental coupon hungry now so there was no putting off going out for something to eat and we stepped out into the dreary streets and made our way to a restaurant we knew and liked. It wasn’t there any more, it had changed hands and anyway it was closed so we walked into the town and I remembered another reason why I prefer to go to Spain or Greece for a few days away. In contrast to a Spanish Plaza Mayor the town centre was deserted, just a few youths on skateboards outside McDonalds and some sad smokers dollar car rental coupon in pub doorways sheltering from the drizzle.
This is a sad feature of English towns where once the shops close at about five o’clock everyone goes home and the main streets are abandoned as though someone has declared a national dollar car rental coupon emergency and everyone has hurried away. In fact, in England most people are suspicious of anyone who wants to stay in a town centre after six o’clock and will happily call the police to investigate if they spot someone hanging around.
Before moving to Grimsby I lived in the small town of Spalding which had a great number of Eastern Europeans living there. It turns out that Poles and Latvians rather enjoy going to the town centre to meet friends dollar car rental coupon in the evening but the residents of Spalding found this difficult to come to terms with and were forever complaining about foreigners in the market place because they considered this to be un-English, unnatural and perverted.
And so we made our way to the Drum and Monkey, a pub with a restaurant that specialises in fish and sea food and we had a fairly good, but rather overpriced meal but they didn’t want us hanging about for too long and after we had finished they declared that they were closing for the night and they would rather appreciate it if we would hurry up with our last drinks and be so good as to move on.
It was still raining outside but this hadn’t stopped the skateboarders from riding up and down or forced the smokers inside and we were left feeling disappointed with Harrogate and made our way back to the guest house and an early night.
This entry was posted in Cathedrals , Europe , Food , History , Hotels , Travel , United Kingdom , World Heritage and tagged Culture , Harrogate , Institute of Housing Annual Conference , Life , Yorkshire . Bookmark the permalink .
I take it you don t like Yorkshire? Ripon didn t fare too well and now you are disappointed with Harrogate. It s not Harrogate s fault that the UK closes at 5pm. I actually found it really odd when I went back to my mum s. You have to remember to get everything done by five. And the only life after that is in pubs. Unless it s early in the week when they are dead too. Strange.
The town I live in isn t posh but they roll up the sidewalks after dinner and there s not much going on in town afterwards. Sigh. If I were to visit someplace this dead, I d be more than disappointed. :-(
In Canada our best months are usually July and August and sometimes a late Indian summer into October. We have lots of rain in April and the rest is up and down. These days the weather is changing and is not as easy to define.
After rural France, where the curfew imposed under the Occupation appeared to remain in force, it was a culture shock to find that our local town in Costa Rica is boiling with life from before 5.00 am until well into the night and if you re spending, they re staying open.
From Wiki Harrogate spa water contains iron, sulphur and common salt. The town became known as The English Spa in the Georgian dollar car rental coupon Era, after its waters were discovered in the 16th century. In the 17th and 18th centuries the chalybeate waters (i.e. containing iron) were a popular health treatment, and the influx of wealthy but sickly visitors contributed significantly to the wealth of the town.
I think this was all very interesting especially the part about local people not wanting anyone to use the town centre after 6 pm because it s un-english! To an outsider, that s funny and infuriating at the same time! It almost sounds like something one child would say to another I don t want to play with it right now, but I don t want you to play with it either .
It is just one of our national characteristics we don t generally go out after 6 o clock. It might have something to do with the fact that most of us have houses and gardens in which to spend our leisure time and if you have a garden there are always some chores!
A man I met in Poland explained to me that they like to go out in the evening because in many cases their apartments are so small that it is uncomfortable and difficult to entertain friends in a confined space so they go out to socialise in the parks and the public squares. As I said English people are generally very suspicious about this!