Andrew Gray is a Harrogate advocate, entrepreneur and dad. Formerly a solicitor who founded and ran a local law firm, he is chief executive of political tech firm Suffrago and a local content creator.

Sipping what must be Harrogate’s smallest Americano in The Everyman the other week, I became aware that a group of teenagers were staring at me.

Every time I looked up, they quickly turned away.

After a few minutes, two of them approached, half-laughing, half-terrified.

“Are you that guy from TikTok?”

I gave my usual answer — that I’m his twin brother — but they weren’t having it. A few requests for shout-outs followed (Northern Performance Academy — you’re welcome), a couple of selfies, and then they disappeared back to their table, triumphant. 

The adults nearby were puzzled.

“Who are you?” one asked.

“Just a dad who does some Harrogate TikToks and YouTubes,” I said, which remains broadly true.

Not long ago, I noticed a new follower: “Smivadee”. That is Matt Smith. Now, Matt Smith is not “a dad who does some TikToks”. He is one of the UK’s original content creators – the UK version of Mr Beast. Matt was uploading videos before YouTube was even YouTube as we now know it. Over the past two decades he has built audiences in the hundreds of thousands and views in the tens of millions. 

Coffee in The Saints

His most famous project began with a Sunday league football team in Essex — Palmers FC — a group of mates playing bog-standard football. He filmed it, edited it, commentated — always fair on the opposition players — uploaded it, and over time something unbelievable happened. The players – his mates - became minor celebrities. People even bought their shirts. This local side, many divisions below Harrogate Town, became a global phenomenon — all thanks to Matt Smith and his camcorder.

(And this is a far more interesting story than the purchase of Wrexham AFC by Ryan Reynolds and its meteoric rise — and one that really ought to be made into a Richard Curtis film. I digress.)

A few messages later, we met for coffee in The Saints, in The Saints area of town.

Neither of us is from Harrogate. I’m from Salford. Matt is Essex, through and through. He spent nearly 40 years there. We are a similar age, both married with two children.

And both of us have fallen for Harrogate.

One day, his wife searched for the happiest place to live in the UK. Harrogate came up. With two young children and a job that can be done from anywhere, they moved north.

“We didn’t know anyone,” he said. “But it’s the best decision we’ve made.”

He talks about the place the way newcomers often do — noticing things that locals stop seeing.

“The flowers,” he said. “They wouldn’t last five minutes where I’m from.”

He told me about his dad visiting and being struck by a man cleaning the streets with what looked like a Ghostbusters backpack. Not the sort of thing that raises an eyebrow here. But it did to his father – and to other visitors, too, no doubt.

A fresh perspective

We talked about how people who have always lived here can lose perspective. You hear it all the time — Harrogate is declining, not what it was, going the wrong way. Blah, blah, blah.

And yet, to someone arriving afresh, Harrogate feels like a new Jerusalem.

Matt wants to raise his children as he was raised — outside, playing, learning patience. Which is slightly ironic, given that his career has been built on screens. He thinks Harrogate is about as good a place as you’ll find for that.

But he does not want his children growing up glued to devices. He thinks, if anything, the tide may be about to turn — a kind of digital fatigue, a desire to “touch grass”, as he put it.

From someone who has spent 20 years online, that’s worth some reflection.

We talked football, as you do. Matt has made it something of a mission to visit grounds across the country, documenting the experience — the food, the atmosphere, the people. He is particularly drawn to the lower leagues, where the game still feels close to what it was.

Now it pains me to say it — but it needs saying — there is something tedious about many Harrogate people. If you have always been here, many of you tend to see the problems and focus on them, relentlessly. 

Speak to someone who has chosen to come here, though — from Essex, from Salford, from elsewhere — and you hear something else entirely. It is almost as if we are living in a different place.

What, surely, we can all agree on it that this is a town where children can walk to school. Where the streets are clean. It’s a place that feels, broadly, safe, and is somewhat insulated from some of the problems that have become normal elsewhere.

None of this is to say that Harrogate is perfect. It isn’t.

Matt told me about a visit to Harrogate Town, when Swindon were the away side. Away fans are not usually known for their generosity. But on that occasion, they got it exactly right:

“This is a nice place and I want to stay here.” 

How right they were.