Bill Bryson - Notes from a small Island

The next day I went shopping with my wife in Harrogate or rather I had a look around Harrogate while she went shopping. Shopping is not, in my view, something that men and women should do together since all men want to do is buy something noisy like a drill and get it home so they can play with it, whereas women aren't happy until they've seen more or less everything in town and felt at least 1,500 different textures. Am I alone in being mystified by this strange compulsion on the part of women to finger things in shops? I have many times seen my wife go twenty or thirty yards out of her way to feel something a mohair jumper or a velveteen bed jacket or something.

'Do you like that?' I'll say in surprise since it doesn't seem her type of thing, and she'll look at me as if I'm mad.

'That? she'll say. 'No, it's hideous.'

Then why on earth,' I always want to say, 'did you walk all the way over there to touch it?' But of course like all longterm husbands I have learned to say nothing when shopping because no matter what you say ' I'm hungry', 'I'm bored', 'My feet are tired', 'Yes, that one looks nice on you, too', 'Well, have them both then', 'Oh, for fuck sake', 'Can't we just go home?', 'Monsoon? Again? Oh, for fuck sake', 'Where have I been? Where have you been?', 'Then why on earth did you walk all the way over there to touch it?' it doesn't pay, so I say nothing.

On this day, Mrs B. was in shoeshopping mode, which means hours and hours of making some poor guy in a cheap suit fetch endless boxes of more or less identical footwear and then deciding not to have anything, so I wisely decided to clear off and have a look at the town. To show her I love her, I took her for coffee and cake at Betty's (and at Betty's prices you need to be pretty damn smitten), where she issued me with her usual precise instructions for a rendezvous. Three o'clock outside Woolworth's. But listen stop fiddling with that and listen if Russell & Bromley don't have the shoes I want I'll have to go to Ravel, in which case meet me at 3.15 by the frozen foods in Marks. Otherwise I'll be in Hammick's in the cookery books section or possibly the children's books unless I'm in Boots feeling toasters. But probably, in fact, I'll be at Russell & Bromley trying on all the same shoes all over again, in which case meet me outside Next no later than 3.27. Have you got that?'

'Yes.' No.

'Don't let me down.'

'Of course not.' In your dreams.

And then with a kiss she was gone. I finished my coffee and savoured the elegant, oldfashioned ambience of this fine institution where the waitresses still wear frilly caps and white aprons over black dresses. There really ought to be more places like this, if you ask me. It may cost an arm and a leg for a cafetiere and a sticky bun, but it is worth every penny and they will let you sit there all day, which I seriously considered doing now as it was so agreeable. But then I thought I really ought to have a look around the town, so I paid the bill and hauled myself off through the shopping precinct to have a look at Harrogate's newest feature, the Victoria Gardens Shopping Centre. The name is a bit rich because they built it on top of Victoria Gardens, so it really ought to be called the Nice Little Gardens Destroyed By This Shopping Centre.

I wouldn't mind this so much, but they also demolished the last great public toilets in Britain a little subterranean treasure house of polished tiles and gleaming brass in the aforementioned gardens. The Gents was simply wonderful and I've had good reports about the Ladies as well. I might not even mind this so much either but the new shopping centre is just heartbreakingly awful, the worst kind of pastiche architecture a sort of Bath Crescent meets Crystal Palace with a roof by B&Q. For reasons I couldn't begin to guess at, a balustrade along the roofline had been adorned with lifesized statues of ordinary men, women and children. Goodness knows what this is meant to suggest I suppose that this is some sort of Hall of the People but the effect is that it looks as if two dozen citizens of various ages are about to commit mass suicide.

On the Station Parade side of the building, where the pleasant little Victoria Gardens and their pleasant little public toilets formerly existed, there is now a kind of openair amphitheatre of steps, where I suppose it is intended for people to sit on those two or three days a year when Yorkshire is sunny, and high above theroad there has been built a truly preposterous covered footbridge in the same Georgian/Italianate/FuckKnows style connecting the shopping centre to a multistorey car park across the way.

Now, on the basis of my earlier remarks about Britain's treatment of its architectural heritage, you may foolishly have supposed that I would be something of an enthusiast for this sort of thing. Alas, no. If by pastiche you mean a building that takes some note of its neighbours and perhaps takes some care to match adjoining rooflines and echo the size and position of its neighbours' windows and door openings and that sort of thing, then yes, I am in favour of it. But if by pastiche you mean a kind of Disneyland version of Jolly Olde England like this laughable heap before me, then thank you but no.

You could argue, I suppose and I dare say Victoria Gardens' architect would that at least it shows some effort to inject traditional architectural values into the townscape and that it is less jarring to the sensibilities than the nearby glassandplastic box in which the Coop is happy to reside (which is, let me say here, a building of consummate ugliness), but in fact it seems to me that it is just as bad as, and in its way even more uninspired and unimaginative than, the wretched Coop building. (But let me also say that neither is even remotely as bad as the Maples building, a Sixties block that rises, like some kind of halfwitted practical joke, a dozen or so storeys into the air in the middle of a long street of innocuous Victorian structures. Now how did that happen?)

So what are we to do with Britain's poor battered towns if I won't let you have Richard Seifert and I won't let you have Walt Disney? I wish I knew. More than this, I wish the architects knew. Surely there must be some way to create buildings that are stylish and forwardlooking without destroying the overall ambience of their setting. Most other European nations manage it (with the notable and curious exception of the French). So why not here?

But enough of this tedious bleating. Harrogate is basically a very fine town, and far less scarred by careless developments than many other communities. It has in the Stray, a 215acre sweep of parklike common land overlooked by solid, prosperous homes, one of the largest and most agreeable open spaces in the country. It has some nice old hotels, a pleasant shopping area and, withal, a genteel and wellordered air. It is, in short, as nice a town as you will find anywhere. It reminds me, in a pleasantly English way, a little of BadenBaden, which is, of course, not surprising since it was likewise a spa town in its day and a very successful one, too. According to a leaflet I picked up at the Royal Pump Room Museum, as late as 1926 they were still dispensing as many as 26,000 glasses of sulphurous water in a single day. You can still drink the water if you want. According to a notice by the tap, it is reputedly very good for flatulence, which seemed an intriguing promise, and I very nearly drank some until I realized they meant it prevented it. What an odd notion.

I had a look around the museum and walked past the old Swan Hotel, where Agatha Christie went and hid after she found out that her husband was a philanderer, the beastly cad, then wandered up Montpellier Parade, a very pretty street filled with awesomely expensive antique shops. I examined the seventyfivefoothigh War Memorial, and went for a long, pleasantly directionless amble through the Stray, thinking how nice it must be to live in one of the big houses overlooking the park and be able to stroll to the shops.