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Feb

Last Updated: 27/03/2024

Why is Harrogate so lacking in fun for young people?

by John Grainger

| 24 Feb, 2024

The UK's largest tenpin bowling operator, Hollywood Bowl, has 66 centres across the UK, all with at least 14 lanes. Photo Hollywood Bowl.

For parents of older children and teenagers it’s a familiar refrain: “There’s nothing to do”. But in the Harrogate district, the kids have got a point: there is very little for them do that’s indoors, legal and affordable.

There are sporting facilities of course, but most young people’s friendship groups are not based on a single interest such as gymnastics or cricket, and besides, the balance between physical activity and social interaction at sports clubs often tends to be tipped towards sweat rather than fun. For pure, escapist enjoyment, there’s not a lot out there.

It’s a problem Sally Haslewood is all too familiar with. As founder of family matters website Harrogate Mumbler, she knows very well what options there are for teenagers in the district. She told the Stray Ferret:

“Harrogate is quite well-served for things for under-12s, but once they get a bit older, there’s very little. There’s really not a lot for them to do other than hang around.

“The poor kids have got nowhere to go. I grew up in Harrogate, and it’s been a problem here for a long time.

“When Oxygen [trampoline park] opened in York last week, the reaction on Mumbler was really enthusiastic – it created quite a buzz – but people were also asking ‘why can’t we have something like that here?’.

Why indeed. Why is there such a dearth of indoor activities for people of pre-drinking age in Harrogate, and – perhaps more to the point – is there any chance of the situation changing?

Trampolining

A few years ago, it very nearly did. In December 2017, a company called Go Jumpin Ltd was granted planning permission to build an indoor trampoline centre at Hornbeam Park.

Families around the district cheered, and waited. But in vain. Go Jumpin went bust and was bought out by a firm that decided not to go ahead with the plans. The centre was never built.

You might think that since then, some other company would have taken up the cause. After all, Harrogate has a far higher average income than most other towns in the region, as well as nearly 7,000 secondary school-aged children. The council was surely onside – it had granted planning permission – and the demand is certainly there.

In the case of trampoline parks, one big issue is height. Hornbeam Park Developments’ Chris Bentley, who remembers the Go Jumpin episode well, said:

“The problem is that you need 10-12 metres in height and most large buildings are only six metres at the eaves, so it’s very difficult to find a building with that height.”

That’s not a problem, though, for pretty much any other indoor leisure pursuit – they tend to be more ground-based – and yet we don’t have many of those either.

We did have an ice rink over Christmas, and many people – including Sally Haslewood – appreciated the extra dimension it brought to the town’s leisure options. So the Stray Ferret contacted several ice-rink operators and a governing body several times to ask how likely a more permanent, indoor facility in the town might be, but received no reply from any of them. Take that as you will, but it could be interpreted as an indicator of their level of interest in the town.

Bowling alleys

Bowling alleys, on the other hand, could be a more likely prospect, and are arguably exactly the kind of facility that Harrogate is crying out for. After all, most operators nowadays don’t just offer bowling, but have other activities on site as well, such as air hockey, crazy pool, ping-pong, batting cages, indoor golf and even karaoke.

Young people in our neighbouring cities are spoilt for choice: Leeds has two bowling-led leisure facilities, and York has two within a 10-minute drive of each other. Even Skipton has one.

In contrast, Harrogate did once have a bowling alley on Tower Street that offered a few lanes of kegelbahn – a German nine-pin variant – but there have been no signs of a replacement since it closed a generation ago.

Gary Brimble, general secretary of industry body UK Tenpin Bowling Operators, suspects it may be a matter of size. He told us:

“Harrogate’s proximity to Leeds and York is probably the reason why nobody has wanted to open a bowling centre there.

“The vast majority of the centres run by the two biggest providers, Hollywood and Tenpin, have 24 lanes or more, like the ones those companies have in Leeds. They look for huge spaces of 25-60,000 sq ft, and it takes a lot of catchment to fill that. The same goes for multiplex cinemas, which Harrogate also doesn’t have.

“But Harrogate might appeal more to smaller providers. Lane 7, Roxy Leisure and Gravity are all expanding rapidly and looking for new sites. They tend to go in with eight, 10 or 12 lanes, coupled with a very good food and drink offer.”

Lane 7 has 13 venues nationally, and four “coming soon”, including one in York. Owner Tim Wilks told the Stray Ferret:

“We’ve looked at Harrogate before and it is somewhere we would consider putting a small bowling alley, however, finding the right property with the right rent makes it difficult – it’s an affluent area and with that comes higher rents.”

High rents and no students

This is a factor mentioned by many in the leisure industry: Harrogate just a little on the expensive side. One leisure property specialist told us:

“The rents in central Harrogate are about the same as they are in Leeds city centre, mainly because it’s a nice place to be, but you'll probably make half the turnover in Harrogate that you would in Leeds. So it all comes down to: where would a leisure company rather go?”

The same source pinpointed another factor which weighs heavily with modern leisure companies. They said:

“One of the problems with Harrogate is that there isn't much of an after-work corporate crowd or a student population past drinking age. The majority of people over 18 leave, at least for a few years while they're at university, and that raises issues with staffing: who's going to work there?”

A possible solution

Nevertheless, the very fact that at least one trampoline company and one bowling operator have considered opening facilities in Harrogate suggests that the town is not beyond hope, and perhaps the model pioneered by Gravity could offer a solution.

The Wakefield-based company has recently taken over former Debenhams premises in Liverpool and Wandsworth, transforming the town-centre department stores into hi-tech leisure hubs, with e-karting, urban street golf, virtual-reality shoot-outs and alternative-reality ten-pin bowling.

Harrogate, of course, has a vacant Debenhams – with a multi-storey car-park next door. And, says Gary Brimble, bowling alleys tend to be regarded as a “planning gain”. He said:

"You don’t get the problems and the concerns from the neighbours that you get with some other types of business, such as casinos or nightclubs, with the noise and people tipping out into the street all at the same time. We tend to be very good neighbours.”

Sadly, though, that ship may have sailed – the new owners of the Debenhams site have applied for planning permission to convert the building into retail units and flats above. But the principle is still valid, according to Hornbeam Park’s Chris Bentley. He said:

“If you could find buildings that could accommodate four or five different leisure facilities, plus catering and toilets, that could be good. You’d be hard pressed to find a newbuild in Harrogate to accommodate all that, but if Boots or M&S ever moved out of their current premises in Harrogate, they’d be perfect – you could have multiple operators there: bowling, paintballing, laser, go-karting.

"The same management could look after the whole thing and it would have the same toilets and catering, and you’d get economies of scale, which is what you need in Harrogate.”

M&S upping sticks might seem like a distant prospect (even if it looks likely in Bradford), but the economic headwinds that are currently giving most sectors such a rough passage appear to be filling the sails of the leisure companies. While many other industries are hunkering down and hoping for better days, bowling operators are enjoying something of a boom. Data from Lloyds Bank shows a massive increase in spending at alleys in December, up by 106% on the previous year – more than any other activity in the ‘non-essential spending’ category.

Gary Brimble said:

“Bowling operators have had continued growth throughout the recession, and there is an awful lot of activity in the leisure sector. There are more locations now, and more spending going on at existing locations. They don’t seem to be as affected as some other companies by people tightening their pursestrings.”

So while the demand is there, and the operators are flush with cash, perhaps one of the smaller operators will meet the demand that has been pent up in Harrogate for decades. In spite of the high rents and the absence of a student population, Harrogate might yet attract an entrepreneurial leisure operator that could give young people a reason to go out on a wet weekend, and "something to do".

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