Audioguides Harrogate

In 1571, a man named William Slingsby discovered a mineral spring at Tewit Well and found that the water tasted unpleasantly of sulphur and iron. He concluded this meant it was medicinal, and was right enough to start a four-century industry. By the 18th century, the wealthy, the gout-ridden, and the fashionably anxious were arriving from London and York to take the waters at Harrogate's pump rooms and baths. The Royal Pump Room on Crown Place, built in 1842 over the strongest sulphur spring in Europe, dispensed glasses of the water until 1969.

The money stayed.

Harrogate consistently ranks among Britain's most desirable places to live, with Victorian and Edwardian townhouses lining streets of considered civic architecture. The Stray, 200 acres of common grassland running through the center of town, is protected by Act of Parliament from any building. Bettys tea room, opened on Cambridge Crescent in 1919 by a Swiss confectioner who got on the wrong train and ended up in Yorkshire, became one of Britain's most genteel institutions. A queue forms outside before it opens.