The Harrogate of the South

Something of the seaside in the palette
Of pale, pastel paint and stucco
And term time home to Claire and Charlotte
Girls whose height would please El Greco:
These days the very rich are long and thin.
Something rather harsh and unrelenting
In the terraces so regimental,
And also something odd preventing
Familiarity, an elemental
British coldness, though there's something continental
In the broad and tree lined streets wherein
Well heeled ladies go clipping-clopping
Into town to do their shopping
At the chain stores which are dripping
With expensive, tasteful, boring clobber,
Reassuring to the bulging wallet.
Something rather soulless; the houses harbour
Nothing interesting, nothing eccentric,
Only sameness, or do I labour
Under misapprehension?
Is there something wild, anarchic,
About the people,  a kind of tension
Which exists between each unforgiving,
Rigid, harsh, hard, building
And the messy humans therein living?