With its roundabouts, belching traffic and building sites, few would claim New Park to be the loveliest suburb of Harrogate.

But it could have been renamed News Park this week due to its constant appearances on the Stray Ferret — not all for good reasons.

On Friday, we revealed how contractors grinding tree stumps at the Tesco site somehow propelled a lump of concrete through the window of a house on Electric Avenue.

Work on the nearby Ripon Road site where the charity Harrogate Skills 4 Living is building supported living flats has also not gone entirely smoothly. The charity said this week it hopes the flats will be up by Christmas after partially-built apartments on the site were recently demolished.

Elsewhere at the ‘crossroads of North Harrogate’, as New Park has been dubbed (by me), plans to build 135 homes off Skipton Road look set to be approved and, in perhaps the only New Park news to be celebrated this week, the local primary school was rated 'good' by Ofsted.

Good news was, however, plentiful elsewhere. You could barely move in Harrogate town centre last Saturday night because the Beam Light Festival was so popular. And Knaresborough Tractor Run, that infectious parade of joy, attracted a record 401 tractors and raised £27,500 for Yorkshire Air Ambulance.

Drone photographer Colin Corker joined me at the start and then hotfooted it around the route to capture some amazing footage. Check this out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4VpapDX84Y

 

Channel 4 captured the somewhat earthier footage of a room of people squabbling when it attended the parish meeting in Ripon called to discuss the cathedral's plans to build an annexe.

Our man on the ground in Ripon, Tim Flanagan, sent this photo of Channel 4's chief correspondent Alex Thomson with tree campaigner Jenni Holman alongside the veteran beech tree at risk of being felled.



Knaresborough Town Council was unusually convivial on Monday night, but there was plenty of crackle in the room when Harrogate Spring Water managing director Richard Hall, flanked by helpers, fielded questions for almost 90 minutes on the company's plans to expand its bottling plant, which would involve felling 450 trees.

A resolution to this saga seems some way off.

Read more:

• Cycling infrastructure in Harrogate and Knaresborough ‘absolutely terrible’


• French brasserie Côte to close Harrogate restaurant


• No date for completion of £18 million Ripon leisure scheme