Linden House Dental Practice, Harrogate is unique in the region because of its long history dating back to the 18th Century.

In 1948, a Harrogate Dental Practice was bought by Ted Kirkby, an ex-RAF dental surgeon, in order to provide free medical and dental treatment for the whole nation. Ted fondly remembers the snaking queues leading from reception, down the stairs and into the street as the dentists struggled to satisfy the huge demand.

Free treatment didn’t actually last that long and by 1952 patients were paying £1 for a course of NHS Dental treatment.

In the following years, Ted teamed up with a Swedish Dentist who had been working in America and this partnership successfully introduced advanced restorative techniques using gold and porcelain crowns and bridges. At this time, the skills required to actually make these crowns was only available in London, so all the laboratory work was acquired from down South.

Ted Kirkby was also a relative of the Thackrays from Leeds, who to this day have the award winning medical museum in Leeds – http://www.thackraymuseum.org/. The Thackrays invented the replacement hip and were involved in ground breaking medical research. Ted shared this thirst for knowledge and application of new ideas which were passed on to his patients at Linden House.

Ted retired from practice in 1988 when current owner Graham Murray took over. Graham shared the same vision and introduced new techniques such as cosmetic veneers and inlays, which required much less preparation of the teeth than crowns; in fact Graham’s first practice in Lancashire was one of the first to use the American Chameleon veneers.

These new cosmetic dental techniques were quickly introduced to support the conventional, tried and tested methods used by the Linden House Dental Practice team, which expanded from two to six dentists in 1988.

UPDATE – JULY 2013

The practice has had two recent retirements Susan Parker and Clare Jackson. New team members Nicola Hillhouse and James Pegg are both experienced Dental surgeons and are looking forward to a bright future with the practice.