I should really name names, but I won’t. For now.
I want to challenge one of the laziest and most damaging habits in Harrogate.
Ever since my wife and I moved here 19 years ago, most of the town’s estate agents have, in their listings, referred to properties in the South of Harrogate as being in “the favoured South Side.”
Ipso facto, if the South is the “favoured side”, the converse must be true: the North of Harrogate is the “unfavoured North Side”.
This lazy trope annoyed me the first time I heard it, and my level of annoyance has only grown.
Favoured by whom? And why? Who decides? And where’s the Maginot Line.
As the estate agents won’t do it, I will. For the agents, the unfavoured North Side must include Bilton, Woodfield, New Park, Jennyfields, Knox and The Duchy (Harrogate’s “ghetto”, where a detached house occupying its own postcode will set you back a cool £1.75 million.) How very dare they defame half of our town.
If the estate agents declare that a location was “popular with commuters to Leeds” or “particularly sought after by families due to proximity to excellent schools”, I would have no complaint whatsoever. Instead, they present opinion as though it were an agreed fact.
I have expressed my displeasure of the term to countless people in this town — the usual response ranges from “it’s not that deep” (Gen Z for “not a big deal”) to “well, it is the best side of Harrogate; it’s a statement of fact”. I disagree: it is a big deal and no side is favoured.
Back to 2007, when we moved here, despite the warning from the estate agents not to buy a house in the North, that’s exactly what we did. Just to spite them. We lived in Bilton, got married there and discovered what a community looks like.
When we later needed a larger house, our purchase in Bilton fell through at survey stage. With my wife heavily pregnant and our own house already sold, we bought practically the only house without a chain.
Drum roll…
…it happened to be in the “favoured South Side”.
So, I’ve lived in both, like most folks reading this column. For me, the North has more community, but the South has geographical utility. Of course, different people value different things. Which is precisely why describing one half of a town as objectively “favoured” is so silly.
The phrase isn’t just lazy; it is commercially stupid. With enough estate agents telling buyers, year after year after year, that one side is favoured, people inevitably begin repeating it back. Not because they have independently reached that conclusion, but because marketing has done the thinking for them. Runseal did exactly what it said on the tin. This phrase distorts the town and feeds snobbery.
And it is very, very stupid: because these agents sell houses across the whole of Harrogate. How dare they have the brass neck to sell a property in the North, unless they have never used that awful phrase.
How can you market a house in Bilton, Jennyfields or Duchy while simultaneously telling buyers that somewhere else is the “favoured” part of town? Locals know that the term is balderdash, but people new to the area will be misled, which thereby distorts the housing market as well as undermining the culture of our town.
Our estate agents are capable of much better. Just this week, one of Harrogate’s better-known agents marketed a doer-upper with the agent wearing a hard hat throughout the video to emphasise the property’s state of disrepair. It was funny, memorable and, most importantly, it sold the potential of that particular house. Full marks to that firm. If they can produce marketing that imaginative, surely they can retire a phrase that has probably appeared in Harrogate property particulars since we hosted Eurovision.
There is good evidence that language shapes thought. In a popular TED talk, the cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky cites an experiment in which German and Spanish speakers described the same bridge very differently because the word “bridge” is grammatically feminine in German but masculine in Spanish. German speakers tended to describe it as elegant and beautiful; Spanish speakers as strong and sturdy. It’s the same bridge. If something as subtle as grammar can influence perception, imagine what twenty years of calling one half of Harrogate “favoured” does. Words don’t merely describe markets. They shape them.
This kind of postcode snobbery – and yes, I think that is exactly what it is – fosters the least attractive side of Harrogate: the keeping-up-with-the-Joneses mentality that the town could really do without.
If an estate agent described one neighbourhood as “the respectable part of town” or “where the better sort of people live”, there would be uproar. “Favoured” is simply a more polite version of the same sentiment. It isn’t “No Blacks. No Irish”, far from it. But it belongs to another age.
(I do hope the editor extends the right of reply to anyone who defends this phrase.)
