Mercer Art Gallery

The building was originally designed as the Promenade Rooms. Since its days as the Promenade Rooms, the building has been known variously as the Victoria Reading Rooms and library (from 1839). At one point it was the housing benefits office. Because the land slopes downwards from the west front of the building to the eastern back end of the hall, there is storage space under the hall and under the adjoining old house. In 1991 the hall's basement space was offered by Harrogate Council for use as a restaurant, but that tenancy no longer exists.

This is a Grade II listed building. The building has a "handsome Italian Renaissance stone frontage", a symmetrical arrangement of five bays with round-arched windows and a projecting entrance bay in the centre. The entrance is a Corinthian portico, with a tympanum above, carrying the borough arms, and the doorway has a fanlight within its arch. This western façade on Swan Road was added, along with a general rebuild, between 1874 and 1876 by architect Arthur Hiscoe. The entrance is "flanked by attached columns and a handsome entablature enriched with symbols of the locality". It has a slated, hipped roof and a parapet with balustrades. Two high pavilions, "with steep ashlar fishtail slate…