Bookshop Tour on Four Wheels – Harlow Carr Garden Centre, Harrogate

PHONE

01423 565418

ADDRESS

Crag Lane Harrogate North Yorkshire HG3 1QB

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WEBSITEVISIT SITE

OPENING HOURS

Open Daily: 09:30 – 18:00

For those of us who would list “visiting bookshops” as one of our hobbies, the last few years have been difficult. Even when restrictions have eased, and we may have felt confident to venture out, not all of us have been able to get into bookshops owing to mobility problems and challenging access. In this series I celebrate the shops that I can actually enter and get round on Morgan, my trusty powerchair. 

Today I am featuring a shop within a shop – a garden centre at RHS Harlow Carr. We actually first discovered it in 2020, when meeting in the gardens for a legal, socially distanced picnic with our adult offspring who we had not seen for months. Venturing into the garden centre I expected the usual – piles of gardening books, maybe a few puzzle books, the usual thing. I entered via the Gardening section, only to discover that the area was in fact a small but well stocked bookshop, with new fiction and non fiction, an older collection of fiction with many interesting titles, biography, history and even specific crime fiction. After months of ordering books on the phone and online it was lovely to actually be able to handle and choose books in real life! As you can see from the photos, the books are well organised in a relatively spacious designated area so my more recent trip was very enjoyable. There are now several entrances to the building, all on the flat,  – there is a slope at one side of the bookshop which is said not to be wheelchair friendly – I could manage it but it is mentioned in the accessibility statement.I am not sure who is in charge of book buying, but there is an excellent selection available whenever I visit.  Thank you Harlow Carr!