Village of the Week: Harewood is an estate village with royal links and TV soap fame

Harewood can be a busy area, that is for sure, as it sits on the A61 route from Harrogate to Leeds city centre, but then much of the village is in the greenbelt and the views, uninterrupted, roll on for miles.

You can hear the birds singing - in fact there is a strong population of once nearly extinct Red Kites - and you are very quickly cut off from the hum drum of traffic.

You’ll need more than a million, a lot more, to buy some of the properties here and others rarely become available.

That perhaps is in part down to Harewood being an estate village.

The manor of Harewood goes back to the 1100s when the de Romelli family, possibly of French Normandy origin, made it their seat after the marriage of the heiress Avice de Romelli to her husband William de Curcy II.

Over the years the manor passed through various generations and descendants until it came into the possession of a distant cousin, Warin de Lisle of Cambridgeshire. The De Lisle’s moved their seat to Rougemont Castle which is now a ruin hidden in overgrown woodland near Weeton, towards Harrogate.

The family had abandoned it in about 1366 when they built Harewood Castle, which was occupied until the 1630s, and in 1656 it was put up for sale as an 'upstanding source of stone and timber'.

For hundreds of years after it had been abandoned, the castle continued to be an important and well-known landmark but at the turn of the millennium it was obvious that decay was taking its toll and the castle was placed on the Buildings at Risk Register by English Heritage.

A £1m rescue plan was drawn up, funded partly through English Heritage and partly by the Harewood Estate.

By 2008 the castle was taken off the Buildings at Risk Register.

The manor of Harewood, including both castles, was purchased in 1738 by the Lascelles family and is still owned by the same family.

This brings us to Harewood House itself and one of the finest stately homes in the region, if not the country.

It was built between 1759 and 1771, for Edwin Lascelles, 1st Baron of Harewood. He was a wealthy West Indian plantation and slave owner and the house replaced Gawthorpe Hall that was originally on the estate.

Over time, the estate passed to subsequent generations of the Lascelles family, who maintain a significant interest and role in its day to day upkeep, management and future.

Notably, in 1922, Henry Lascelles, Viscount Lascelles married Princess Mary, the only daughter of George V. They used to live in Goldsborough Hall but moved permanently into Harewood House on the death of Henry's father in 1929.

During the Second World War, the house acted as a resident convalescent hospital but by the late 1940s, the Princess Royal and her family had moved permanently back to Harewood.

Their eldest son, George Henry Hubert Lascelles, became the 7th Earl of Harewood.

When he was born he was sixth in line to the throne. His first cousin was Queen Elizabeth II, and when he died in 2011 he had become 46th in line to succession.

He married Marion Stein, a concert pianist in 1929. Due to his position in the Royal order, the marriage had to be approved first under The Royal Marriages Act 1772.

The current incumbent of Harewood House is David Lascelles, the 8th Earl of Harewood who is a cousin of King Charles.

His sons are taking the estate forward with food and drink projects that showcase the estate’s produce from the land and livestock, as well as tourism in holiday cottages and experiences within the estate grounds - which are also well-known for being home to wild deer, otters and herons as well as Cyril the Vietnamese potbellied pig who was abandoned over the estate wall but ended up finding his forever home there.

The Earl has a career in film and television which may be the reason behind Harewood House and its connections with music and television.

Since 1996, part of the estate has been developed as the village and filming location for the ITV soap Emmerdale. Elton John performed two concerts in the grounds in 1999 and Irish boyband, Westlife, held a concert here in 2006.

The popular show, Victoria, from ITV starring Jenna Coleman and Tom Hughes has filmed at Harewood House and the House and grounds were used as a filming location for the 2019 Downton Abbey film.

The house was the location for BBC's Mary Berry's Country House at Christmas with Mary Berry, broadcast on Christmas Day 2018.

However, Harewood has also been used to benchmark the difference between the most affluent ward in the city of Leeds and the most deprived.

Sister newspaper, The Yorkshire Evening Post ran A City Divided campaign in 2019 which compared Harewood to Harehills - just seven miles away.

Its research found that babies born in Harewood were more likely to live ten years longer than those in Harehills. The life expectancy for men in Harewood at that time was 85 and 88.6 for women while in Harehills it is 76 and 81.2 respectively.

Crime rates varied vastly with Gipton and Harehills recording 6, 064 crimes within a year and Harewood recording 971.