History

Harrogate owed everything to its water. From the seventeenth century the town’s sulphur and chalybeate springs drew people who believed the foul-smelling wells could cure them, and by the eighteenth century inns were rising to lodge the visitors. A White Hart is recorded on this site by 1765, serving the spa trade and doubling, in the way of coaching inns, as a place for auctions and public business.

The Victorian decades turned the spa into a resort. The railway arrived, hydrotherapy became fashionable, and Harrogate rebuilt itself in stone. The White Hart was reconstructed in 1846 by George Townsend Andrews, an architect best known for his railway work in Yorkshire, giving the old inn the scale and dignity that the new age of the water cure demanded.

The twentieth century pressed the building into other uses. It was requisitioned during the Second World War for government departments, and after the war it served the National Health Service as a conference centre and hospital annexe. The University of York held it from 1988 before it returned to private hands, and it has since gone back to the trade it was built for.