North Yorkshire Council is spending £9.4 million on Harrogate Convention Centre, adding breakout conference rooms in Studio Two for around 1,200 delegates alongside the existing 2,000-seat auditorium.
Convention centre director Paula Lorimer said the new rooms "will open up new revenue opportunities that in turn benefit the town's hotels, restaurants, cafes and shops". It is a substantial bet on people leaving the house, placed in a decade that has mostly gone the other way.
The Cinema Numbers Are the Clearest Evidence
British cinemas sold 123.5 million tickets last year, against 176.1 million in 2019. That is roughly 30 per cent below the last full year before the habit broke, and it happened while the ticket got dearer, the average rising from £7.11 in 2019 to £8.01 last year.
The industry has recovered from far worse. UK Cinema Association records put admissions at 1.635 billion in 1946 and 54 million in 1984, and the multiplex more than tripled the 1984 figure in the decades that followed. The Everyman opened on Station Parade in 2016, carved out of an office building, with five screens, armchair seating and food brought to the seat. It is a different proposition from the Odeon on East Parade, which is still trading, and the ticket reflects that.
What Actually Changed in the House
The infrastructure arrived first. Ofcom reported in May that full fibre broadband now reaches 24.9 million homes, or 82 per cent of the country, up from 78 per cent six months earlier. Take-up lags well behind availability, at 47 per cent of the households that can get it.
The regulator's Connected Nations report last November put average data use at 583 gigabytes per connection per month by July 2025, a rise of 10 per cent in a year. Its Media Nations study, published in July, found 72 per cent of households now own a connected television, and that time spent watching YouTube on a TV set rather than a phone has risen from nine minutes a day in 2022 to nineteen. The practical upshot is that a living room now carries the bandwidth and the screen for anything a venue can send it, which was not true of the living rooms of twenty years ago.
The Formats That Kept Other People In Them
The home versions that worked did not win on convenience. They kept another person at the other end of it. Peloton's studios at 11 Floral Street in Covent Garden film classes in front of an audience that is physically present, and the in-studio leaderboard now takes in the people at home. A rider in the room can send one of them a high five. Take a leading site like the Hippodrome casino online, where it seats several players at one live table, and none of them can see each other. The croupier is the only person any of them can see.
That makes it the thinnest version of the idea, and it is still not a recording. Somebody is dealing in real time and will not wait. Live auctions run on the same principle at a far greater scale. Auction Technology Group, which operates the-saleroom.com, put more than 99,000 auctions through its platforms in its last financial year, with 84.8 million bids placed and buyers in 190 countries. A bid is worth something only because a rival might beat it. Each of those formats is harder to fit around a working day than the recorded version of the same thing, and people choose them regardless.
Theatre Went the Other Way
Anyone arguing that Britain has stopped going out has to account for the theatre, because the theatre refuses to co-operate. SOLT and UK Theatre counted 37 million attendances across the country in 2025, 17.64 million of them in the West End. National Theatre Live began on 25 June 2009 with Helen Mirren in Phèdre, shown in 270 cinemas across 19 countries. It now reaches more than 2,500 cinemas in 70 countries.
Research published by the National Theatre in May, drawing on more than 5,500 UK responses, found no sign that filmed theatre has taken audiences away from the live version. 89 per cent still name in-person attendance as their first choice, and 60 per cent said they consume more theatre overall because the filmed option exists. 20 per cent of the streaming audience identify as disabled, against 15 per cent of the in-person audience. The numbers do not support the tidy version, in which the sofa simply beats the auditorium.
The Town Is Betting Both Ways
Work on the convention centre began over the summer. The council expects the new rooms to bring in an extra £1.7 million a year in revenue, and it currently subsidises the centre's operation to the tune of £1.1 million a year, though the two figures are not directly comparable and the council has not published a net projection. Pressure elsewhere is real. Figures from the brewing industry record 33 pub closures across North Yorkshire since 2016, and business rates at the Blues Bar on Montpellier Parade are set to rise from £31,000 to £62,000 a year.
The town's older rooms are still standing and still selling. Harrogate Theatre opened in 1900 and runs a 60-seat studio on its third floor, and the 950-seat Royal Hall reopened in January 2008 after a £10.7 million restoration. The indoor funfair returns to the Yorkshire Event Centre over October half term, and Leeds remains thirty-five minutes away by train. Nobody has yet built a version of a waltzer that works in a living room.
