Great Yorkshire Show
agricultural show in the North of England

The Great Yorkshire Show (GYS) is an annual agricultural show which takes place on the Great Yorkshire Showground in Harrogate, North Yorkshire, in the North of England. Organised and run by the Yorkshire Agricultural Society (YAS), the show lasts four days, starting on the second Tuesday of July. Since the demise of the Royal Show, the GYS has been the largest agricultural show in England; however, within the United Kingdom, it is surpassed by both the Royal Welsh Show and the Royal Highland Show. The show is highly successful and the society generated income of £9.6 million in 2016. A new hall at the showground, costing £11 million, opened in 2016 and produced more than £1 million of income in its first year.
History
The history of the GYS is intimately connected with that of the Yorkshire Agricultural Society (YAS).
1837: The YAS was founded; its primary aim was stated as "... to hold an Annual Meeting for the Exhibition of Farming Stock, Implements &c., and for the General Promotion of Agriculture."
1838: The first YAS Show was held in the Barrack Yard at Fulford, near York. The numbers attending were not recorded, but the event was counted a success; police had to use their batons to restore order among the large numbers of visitors when they began to force their way in without paying.
Originally intended as a peripatetic event, the Show moved to Leeds, Northallerton and Kingston upon Hull in subsequent years.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 30, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5600318. Authority coordinates are 53.984, -1.506. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2016, 1837 and 1838.
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This entry incorporates text from “Great Yorkshire Show” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.