Up to 30,000 visitors ate expected at Newby Hall over the next three days for the Harrogate Autumn Flower Show.

The spring and autumn shows, organised by the North of England Horticultural Society, are among the most highly anticipated events on the gardening calendar.

Visitors to Newby, which is between Ripon and Boroughbridge, will see Britain’s biggest display of autumnal blooms and fresh produce.

This year sees the return of the National Vegetable Society’s national championships, which includes a giant vegetable contest.

There will also be talks and demonstrations across three live stages

Show director Nick Smith said:

“We love having the autumn flower show here at Newby Hall, it truly is an inspiring and beautiful location to celebrate and promote the very best in horticulture.

“This year we have such an incredible line-up of exhibitors, installations, and an exciting programme of live stage action, that we can’t wait to get things underway.”

The first day of the show coincides with what would have been Agatha Christie’s 132nd birthday and to mark the occasion, floral displays inspired by the Queen of Crime have been created.

Talented florists including celebrity floral designer Jonathan Moseley and award-winning Harrogate florist Helen James have created floral installations depicting book titles inspired by crime writing greats as part of the Blooms of Deception display.

Admission to the show includes access to Newby’s gardens and children’s adventure playground.

For further details, and to buy tickets, click here.

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Lauren Crisp is a book editor, writer and keen follower of arts and culture. Born and raised in Harrogate, Lauren recently moved back to North Yorkshire after a stint in London, where she regularly reviewed theatre – everything from big West End shows to small fringe productions. She is now eager to explore the culture on offer in and around her home town.  You can contact Lauren on laurencrispwriter@gmail.com 

The West End met West Yorkshire last night as Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap, the world’s longest-running play, hit the stage at Leeds Grand Theatre. The show’s 70^th anniversary tour is taking the production to more than 70 venues countrywide, meaning us northerners finally have the opportunity to don our detective hats and guess whodunnit.

It is the early 1950s, and newly married couple Mollie and Giles Ralston have just opened a guesthouse in the countryside outside London. As the pair prepare for the arrival of their first visitors, a newsreader on the wireless reports on a brutal murder in the capital. None the wiser, the Ralstons rally, as one by one, their eagerly anticipated guests arrive at Monkswell Manor.

But, as a snowstorm cuts them off from the outside world, the suspicion and intrigue mounts: could the killer be among them? The scene is set for one of Christie’s classic closed-circle mysteries.

The tour’s staging is a no-expense-spared affair: the set is masterful, with its intimate, wood-panelled drawing room; a fire roars in the hearth, as, outside the window, snow falls thickly; scattered trinkets and nick-nacks on side tables place us firmly in the past, as does costume. In the ornate surrounds of Leeds Grand Theatre, where chairs gently squeak under the weight of their occupants and a chandelier glitters overhead, the play feels quite at home.

Yet, the set’s cosiness is challenged by a mounting sense of isolation and unease, thanks to the play’s eight-strong and triumphant cast. Each member so impeccably drawn in the first instance by Christie’s imagination, the actors make their characters their own, with a clear understanding of their unique roles: each distinct and each crucial to the successful telling of the tale.

I understand now more than ever this iconic play’s longevity: a quintessentially British whodunnit, devised by the Queen of Crime, whose flawless recipe for murder mysteries, which made her the best-selling novelist of all time, is just as perfect a concoction on stage as in the pages of her novels. With its tight structure, ingenious clues and final outrageous twist, The Mousetrap is a must-see. Beyond that, my lips are sealed.

Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap is on at the  Leeds Grand Theatre until September 2.  

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Lauren Crisp is a book editor, writer and keen follower of arts and culture. Born and raised in Harrogate, Lauren recently moved back to North Yorkshire after a stint in London, where she regularly reviewed theatre – everything from big West End shows to small fringe productions. She is now eager to explore the culture on offer in and around her home town.  You can contact Lauren on laurencrispwriter@gmail.com 

The twentieth-anniversary edition of Harrogate’s Crime Writing Festival went out with a bang on Sunday, with Lucy Worsley, acclaimed historian, curator and broadcaster, filling the final special-guest spot of the weekend.

Following the publication of her latest book, Agatha Christie: A Very Elusive Woman, Worsley gave Sunday’s crowd an insight into the life of the beloved novelist (a woman whose books, they say, are outsold only by Shakespeare and the Bible). And how very apt that a celebration of the Queen of Crime should provide the grand finale to a weekend’s worth of the genre in all its glory, at a festival with Christie as its very raison d’etre. Christie is, as many Harrogate locals know, inextricably linked to our town’s history. It was in December 1926 that the already fêted Christie, grief-stricken by her mother’s recent death and her husband’s infidelity, seemingly disappeared without a trace. Eleven days later, she was discovered at the Swan Hydropathic Hotel – or the Old Swan, as we know it today.

Simply walking through the corridors of this grand old hotel is enough to spark anyone’s imagination, but for Christie fans, it must be magic to picture her there almost one hundred years ago. It is an enchantingly historic setting, but also one which was for Christie, according to Worsley, quite literally an escape from reality.

The novelist’s “disappearance” was subject to wildly varying interpretations. The discovery of her abandoned car led many to speculate she had taken her own life, yet, without a body, a mammoth police investigation ensued, a public circus involving all manner of theories and personalities: in her book, Worsley explains how Arthur Conan Doyle was said to have employed a psychic to connect to Agatha via one of her discarded gloves.

When a member of the hotel staff eventually revealed Christie’s location to authorities, she was found alive and seemingly well, but, as she claimed, with no memory whatsoever of events. The press pack claimed that such a tale had guilty written all over it: that either she had meant to frame her husband for murder, or it was an elaborate publicity stunt in the style of one of her very own detective novels (indeed, sales of her books went through the roof at the time).

What does Worsley think was really going on with Agatha during these fateful days? She presents evidence to suggest that Christie may have suffered a rare psychological condition described as “dissociative fugue”, thought to be a mechanism by which someone extracts themselves from a stressful situation as a form of self-protection. They forget who they are, taking on a new identity and reality. In Agatha’s case, she became Mrs Teresa Neele from South Africa; she appeared to enjoy her stay, participating in activities and making friends, apparently oblivious to the manhunt.

Worsley has found historical records, as well as autobiographical hints in Christie’s own later novels, to suggest it likely the author subsequently visited a psychotherapist, reinforcing the theory that Agatha was unwell. Worsley decries the injustice of the media frenzy and its enduring impact on Christie, writing “… people ever since have suspected her of duplicity and lies.”

It was, Worsley believes, a terrible time for the author, but asserts that 1926 also acted as a watershed year, one which marked a new phase in Christie’s life and writing. As the historian puts it, “… act one of her life was over […] and even she had begun to see that within an ending, may lie a new beginning”. She divorced her first husband, remarried, and lived out the rest of her truly remarkable life: the author of some eighty books, celebrated the world over. Christie is part of the fabric of the cultural history of this country, and of the small spa town of Harrogate, which, for eleven days in 1926, was home to a slice of crime-writing history.

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An appearance by TV historian Lucy Worsley will be among the highlights of this year’s Northern Aldborough Festival.

The line-up for the nine-day festival, which is one of the annual highlights of the Harrogate district arts scene, was revealed today.

Ms Worsley will give a talk on crime writer Agatha Christie on June 19.

Trumpeter Matilda Lloyd, pianist Sunwook Kim and the Armonico Consort will also head to the Roman village for the festival, which runs from June 15 to 24.

Now in its 29th year, the event offers audiences the chance to experience performances normally seen in the world’s biggest concert halls in a rural village setting.

Tickets went on sale for Friends of the Festival today and will be available to the wider public on March 27.

Italian opera and Beethoven

BBC Young Musician of the Year brass winner, trumpet-player Matilda Lloyd will perform a programme from Italian Opera.

Matilda Lloyd. Pic credit: Benjamin Ealovega

The first Asian winner of the Leeds International Piano Competition, Sunwook Kim will play Beethoven’s final sonatas in St Andrew’s Church.

There will be a rare double bill of Haydn’s comedies, The Diva and The Apothecary, presented by the nationally-renowned, Bampton Classical Opera company.

This year also includes the inaugural New Voices Competition, a nationwide hunt for the best classical vocal talent.

Festival director Robert Ogden outside St Andrew’s Church

The jazz ensemble, The Tim Kliphuis Sextet, will perform at the Old Hall in North Deighton and the vocal ensemble, Armonico Consort, will perform Monteverdi’s Vespers of 1610 in St Andrew’s Church.

Further details are available here.

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A brown plaque is to be erected outside one of Harrogate’s oldest and best-known clothes shops.

Property expert Alex Goldstein, with the support of local historian Malcolm Neesam, successfully applied to erect the plaque outside gentlemen’s outfitters Rhodes Wood. on Parliament Street.

The shop used to belong to Mr Goldstein’s great grandfather Louis Copé, a fashion designer whose female emporium opened on the site in 1922.

Mr Copé was a Polish designer whose high society customers over the years included Queen Mary, her daughter Princess Mary and Agatha Christie. The shop operated under royal patronage.

The store itself featured in the film Agatha, starring Dustin Hoffman and Vanessa Redgrave.

Louis Copé

Mr Copé moved to Harrogate because he believed the pure air would help his asthma. Mr Goldstein, who still lives in the area, said:

“I am so pleased to have been able to mark the history and story of my great grandfather, whose fashion house spanned decades and formed important memories for so many people in and around Harrogate.

“It has been lovely hearing people’s memories and visiting the Pump Rooms to actually see some of the garments that were made in his sewing rooms which are stored there.”

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Jeremy Beaumont, who owns Rhodes Wood, has been supportive of preserving the history of the building.

“When we took over the store in 1997, there were still many of the original features and cabinets in the shop, in such good quality and condition, that we still have them in the store to this day, literally 100 years later. The quality of the store fittings must have been superb, and to a very high standard.

“It is our pleasure to recognise the past history of the building, and we are delighted to host the plaque outside for everyone to see”.

The plaque is due to go up any day now.

Mr Goldstein is asking for anyone with memories from Louis Copé, or even items of clothing and hats etc, to contact him at alex@alexgoldstein.co.uk.