I lived in Harrogate for nearly 18 of the 24 years of my life to date. From 1990 until 2007 when I spread tentative wings and departed for university, only returning home sporadically until leaving more or less for good in April 2012. So it is that I write this travelling back perhaps for the very last time, to say farewell to the house I grew up in as my parents undertake their similarly avid escape; all the while embroiled in a Newton's Cradle of conflicting emotions, buffeting between nostalgic melancholy at one pole and profound ambivalence at the other.
For better or worse, Harrogate has always seemed like a Northern anomaly, an outpost town embedded in the heart of North Yorkshire; its the Falklands Islands still under sovereign ownership by the imperialistic South of England. With its bucolic gardens, Betty's Tea Rooms, spa history, and floral crescents, Harrogate could so easily have been lifted straight from somewhere like Hampstead or Dulwich Village and plonked down as the 'golden centre'of the Leeds, York, Bradford triangle. Its ageing population, highly-ranked schools, plush public gardens and cocktail of tranquil affluence, all coalesce to form a town that was recently voted 'the happiest place to live in the UK' (according to a Rightmove survey).
I would like to contest this very dubious piece of propaganda, to prise out its flaws and assert my new-found conviction that Harrogate exists in a purely ambiguous state of being, if at all; representing nothing more substantial than an idyllic suburban mirage.
This sensation was one that first began to dawn on me upon returning after 4 months travelling across America in 2011. So accustomed had I become to vertiginous skyscrapers, horizon-breaching highways and expansive geography, that my entire sense of scale and distance had become completely stretched into new configurations. Walking round the town centre was like a depressive epiphany; never before had everything and everyone appeared so Lilliputian, quaintly cloistered and, above all, illusory. Even the hue and textures seemed, on a dreary November day, as though I'd been immersed in monochrome once again after so long in bright Technicolor. The quiddity of the place appeared entirely flimsy and capable of dissolving into abstract disarray at the slightest change in the weather.
Essentially, this sums up the experience of growing up in Harrogate. It is a wealthy town - according to the ONS, the average household income is nearly £42,000, around 15% higher than both North Yorkshire and the rest of England. It is also a long-time Tory heartland, until the prevailing winds of 1997 provoked the stiff barometer shift to Lib Dems, which, realistically, was as radical a change as Harrogate was ever going to engineer (it has since returned to Tory type). The ethnicity of the populace is predominately upper-middle class and white (ONS - in 2009 White British accounted for over 90%). Indeed, I vividly remember a primary school trip to Bradford (a mere 20 miles away), and feeling like we'd arrived in an entirely foreign country, as though I expected the Ganges to be in full flow on the other side of the car park.
Growing up in an often ramshackle semi (given my Dad's predilection for DIYVS - do-it-yourself-very-slowly), I would go round to school-friends' houses that to me appeared as veritable mansions, like something from a period costume drama, in which they often had an entire wing for their exclusive use. As I grew older and attended secondary school, I began to discern the sense of entitlement and premature arrogance that inflated so many of my peers. That distinct brand of Saturday rugby club, designer boutique, rah-rah pomposity that follows the logic that anyone with a penny less than yourself is to be viewed from a down-the-nose vantage point.
When I first moved away I found myself almost embarrassed to inform new acquaintances that I came from Harrogate, feeling myself being immediately labelled as an effete posh-boy who had, up until then, languished in the comfortable womb of privilege and serenity. Instead, I began habitually opting for the more obliquely urban reply "somewhere near Leeds". This dearth of personal geographical connection persists; I spent 18 years growing up in Yorkshire and yet feel no affinity to the district or class myself as being a Yorkshireman in any way, shape or form, because the notion of Harrogate being assimilated to Yorkshire is frankly laughable.
The famous polemicist Christopher Hitchens said that,
"for a lot of people, their first love is what they'll always remember. For me it's always been the first hate, and I think that hatred, though it provides often rather junky energy, is a terrific way of getting you out of bed in the morning and keeping you going."
Certainly I learned to resent a great many of my school peers with a perhaps unwarranted zeal during those angst-ridden teenage years. In fact, several firm and lasting friendships were built on the bedrock of this shared animosity.
I suppose the crux of my resentment stems from my firm conviction that nothing of any cultural import or significance could ever be nurtured from Harrogate's teat. Nothing of any innovation, exhilaration or audacity could be coaxed into active being from its consciously supine state. As much as it pains me to propose (as someone of some ambition), the notion that anyone of any expansive influence could be born and raised in Harrogate is absurd. The very nature of the environs would not be conducive for the fostering of a civil rights champion, a statesman, a truly creative artist, a revolutionary, or a radical free-thinker. Instead, Harrogate is exemplary at producing a pantheon of ready-made solicitors, accountants, middle managers and chartered surveyors.
Of course, many would claim that there are many far worse places one could grow up in, that one should feel lucky to have grown up in such auspicious an environment, and of course they would be right. But it is precisely this intrinsic truth that, I believe, by the very measure of its conviction sends the alternate argument rushing to the fore like an antagonistic bungee jumper.
Growing up in Harrogate is to be largely sheltered, feather-bedded in seclusion from any of the character-building hustle or strife of growing up in a city environment or somewhere with a beating commercial or cultural pulse. It's hard to gain any real sense of the pressures and strains of the external world when your hometown appears able to prosper resplendently on Turkish spa packages and afternoon cream teas. Only with hindsight do I realise quite how shrouded in fakery and artifice so many of my demographic really were (is it not predictable that Harrogate also has a tradition of high alcohol and drug abuse amongst young adults?); almost as affectless as the Los Angelenos in Bret Easton Ellis' 'Less Than Zero'.
Naturally, I deign to elevate myself too far above this myre of character besmirching; that of being sorely ill-equipped by the mundane ease that invokes the delusion that the rest of the world, and life as a whole, must be just as otiose and carefree. I stress that I don't believe this to be a fault of parenting or of schooling, but the necessary condition to evolve from having had to cultivate an identity in such a cozy flower-bed of suburbia. Indeed I contend that Harrogate is a superlative place to move to as an adult, but not one to grow up in as a child.
Shrouded in this naive impression of the world and its true vagaries, by the time I encountered my first real physical violence at the age of 16 (so ludicrously advanced an age that by itself speaks volumes), it was as though I'd been plunged into an ice bath of reality that awoke every sensibility as to how life really operated. In many ways it was one of the most profound experiences of my formative years, and although distressing at the time, so much so that I languished in a paranoid funk for several weeks after the event, undoubtedly it was a vitally necessary one. The brief assault was like electrotherapy convulsing me out of the all-too-comfortable confines of my teenage perceptions that the spinning jenny of Harrogate's illusory powers had so effectively woven.
The place I have been that most reminded me of Harrogate, aside from the extremity of both landscape and climate, was Palm Springs in California. Whilst long being a place of leisure and exile for Hollywood’s glitterati, it was striking in its lack of tangible identity or of anything to warrant its actual settlement in such a barren desert. It felt like a hologram town, or a place that should be constantly on the move in search of an unambiguous identity that could it appropriate for its own ends. It felt like it was purely an illusion, rippling out of the desert heat; and, like Harrogate, I became convinced that in a sense it didn’t actually exist.
As you may have guessed by now, there is little love lost between myself and my hometown. I appreciate it for all the benefits and opportunities it afforded me, whilst condemning it for its flaws and deficiencies. This distinct dichotomy is how I will forge the place into my latter-day memory as an adult. I’m sure there are many who will strongly disagree or take issue with the points I have made. If that is the case, then so be it. If I had to conclude with an overriding aphorism I would state that:
Harrogate is a fluffy pillow of a place that so many had plumped up warm and ready for them.
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