Councillors have rejected a plan to expand a water bottling plant into a community wood following a campaign involving Dame Judi Dench, Dame Joanna Lumley and Bianca Jagger as well as hundreds of local people.
A planning meeting on Friday rejected proposals from Harrogate Spring Water (HSW) to expand its existing facility in the town.
Ahead of the meeting, Dame Judi urged councillors on North Yorkshire Council’s Harrogate and Knaresborough Area Planning Committee to reject the plan, saying it will destroy “a living, growing woodland created through patience, care and public spirit”.
The council received more than 1,000 objections to the scheme, which would have seen the removal of hundreds of trees at a site called Rotary Wood, which was planted by children 20 years ago.
HSW’s managing director Richard Hall told Friday’s meeting the facility would create more than 50 new jobs, and how the firm planned to establish a new public wood, featuring 491 new trees, as well as committing to planting around 3,000 trees on land around the Harrogate district.
Campaigner Sarah Gibbs addressed the meeting and said after that she was now preparing for the company, which is owned by the France-based multinational food-products company Danone, to appeal.
Speaking outside Harrogate Civic Centre after the decision, Ms Gibbs said: “I’m thrilled and overjoyed with our councillor’s decision to refuse global corporation Danone ownership of our public green space.
“Our beautiful asset of community value Rotary Wood is safe again for now.”
She said: “This decision sends an important message – people power works.
“Your voice matters to all who planted those woods, including children now with their own children.
“Your efforts towards a more sustainable future will not be uprooted.
“Your efforts did and do matter, and we will keep fighting for them.”
Ms Gibbs said: “Go somewhere else. Leave our woods alone.”
In her letter to councillors ahead of the meeting, Dame Judi said: “Rotary Wood is not an empty plot waiting for a better use. It is a living, growing woodland created through patience, care and public spirit.
“Local families, volunteers, schoolchildren and community supporters helped plant it and watch it take root.
“Over the years it has become part of Harrogate’s natural fabric and part of the area’s shared sense of place.”
The York-born Oscar, Bafta and Oliver Award winning actor added: “At a time when the country is talking so urgently about biodiversity loss, climate pressure and the need to protect nature close to where people live, it is deeply troubling that a healthy community woodland could be treated as disposable.”
