Harrogate; Friday, 20 May, 2022

I’d come up to Leeds the afternoon before so I was able to work out of the hotel in the morning and make the final leg of my journey to Harrogate over my lunch break.

I ended up on a work call that ran quite late so by the time I checked out of the hotel I had to run to make the train, which I did, but only just and then only because a late inbound train had kept the signal on red past it’s scheduled departure time.

After arriving in Harrogate I walked across town to my hotel to checkin and then carried on working until the end of the business day.

I’d booked an evening session at the Turkish Baths, so after finishing work I headed over there.

The Royal Baths in Harrogate were built at the height of the spa craze that gripped the country prior to WWI. The highly elaborate baths included many different treatment rooms, as well as a set of Turkish Baths. As the spa craze ended the bulk of the baths were decommissioned and turned into council offices, just the Turkish Baths remained. As other facilities across the country have closed they are now the only surviving Turkish Baths that retain their original design and layout.

Despite being called Turkish Baths, and having a very Turkish design inside these aren’t actually Turkish Baths in the sense of what I’d experienced in Istanbul. Instead they were much more like what you’d imagine a set of Roman Baths would have looked like, even the naming convention for the rooms was lifted straight from the Roman complexes.

After arrival and checkin I got changed and waited in the Frigidarium – which at first feel didn’t feel particularly cold, but after a quick tour round the facilities – the cold plunge pool, the Steam Room, the Tepidarium, Caldarium and Laconicum – walking back into the Frigidarium it was noticeably cooler than the rest of the complex.

After the tour we were left on our own to move through the different rooms at our own paces with just the reminder to drink lots of water and go through the process of heat, shower, dip in the cold pool, repeat. The two hours of the session passed surprisingly quickly and before too long we were all being called back into to the Frigidarium where you have to spend 30 minutes at the end of your session getting your body back into a condition where it can face the worse that North Yorkshire rather than Lazio can throw at you.

I quickly popped to a nearby fast food restaurant to grab a late dinner and then headed back to the hotel.

All the hype about the baths, which I thought had just been that – hype, was that after being in the baths you’d feel really relaxed actually turned out to be true and by the time I got back to the hotel I was struggling to stay awake, so I had an early night ready to get up early the following morning for a busy day.