Harrogate's Valley Gardens is a 17 acre park near the centre of the town, created in the 1880s when Harrogate was a fashionable spa town. It now has recreation areas: tennis, crazy golf, skateboard park and children's playground, along with extensive areas of garden, much of it laid out in typical municipal style with lawns, pathways and formal bedding. It's a style that tends to be going out of fashion as it is very high maintenance but Harrogate prides itself on being a garden city and the Gardens are kept very manicured, attracting a lot of visitors.
It's an area with a lot of mineral springs and what is now the Magnesia Well Café (above) used to be one of several pump rooms where you could drink the mineral rich spa water.
The Sun Pavilion and Colonnade was designed originally as a covered walk to link the Royal Pump Room at the entrance to the gardens with the Royal Bath Hospital, where people came to receive various spa and hydrotherapy treatments, believed to be cures for illness. Nowadays I think the Sun Pavilion is sometimes used for weddings and events.
Some of the buildings around the edge of the Gardens are really grand, evidence of Harrogate's heyday as a fashionable spa town. The building in the picture above, built in 1900, was originally a hotel and is now luxurious office space.
The land train was not running on the day I visited but it must be popular when it is, judging by its size.
I never hear Harrogate mentioned without thinking of the cricket commentator, Trevor Bailey, who, despite being educated at a good public school and Cambridge University, somehow convinced himself that Harrogate was a seaside town! I presume he was thinking of Margate and Ramsgate, but those gardens would not look out of place in any English coastal resort. I hope that at least some of these beautiful grounds can be maintained.
ReplyDeleteIt all looks so elegant.
ReplyDeleteAlthough I am not far from Harrogate when in Ripon for my annual Yorkshire Holiday, I rarely make it into the town itself, as there always seem to be so many other things to do, places to go and people to see. But it is still an elegant town, and the valley gardens really are beautiful. Maybe next year my sister and I should plan for a day out in town, it's really been ages.
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