Projects
Harrogate Cure
Positioning and regenerating Harrogate as Britain’s Living Spa, looking back at the town’s ecological, hydrogeological, health and wellbeing roots to inform its future.
Harrogate Cure is a long-term community initiative to revive Harrogate’s identity as a living spa town for the 21st century. It looks back to the town’s original healing framework, its mineral springs, therapeutic landscapes, gardens, walks, baths, music, sociability and pioneering ambition, and asks how those principles can be reimagined for today.
Rather than treating spa heritage as something fixed in the past, Harrogate Cure sees it as a practical framework for the future. It connects water, nature, culture, health, movement, food, community and place-making into a wider vision for the town. The aim is to help Harrogate become more than a visitor destination. A living model for wellbeing, landscape stewardship and place renewal.
Through research, storytelling, design, partnerships and public programmes, Harrogate Cure is building a clearer picture of what makes Harrogate distinctive and how that distinctiveness can be used to shape its future. This includes the town’s springs and spa ensemble, the Stray, Valley Gardens, the Pinewoods, the surrounding Wildbelt, and the wider network of places that once formed Harrogate’s therapeutic environment.
Fairfax Corner
Maintaining the tradition of the corner shop combines independent retail with slower forms of hospitality.
Fairfax Corner explores the continuing value of the neighbourhood corner. At a time when many small everyday spaces have disappeared or become purely transactional, Fairfax Corner holds onto the idea that a shop can still be a social, local and generous place. It combines independent retail, hospitality and creates a small but meaningful point of connection within the neighborhood.
The project is rooted in the tradition of the end-of-terrace shop: modest, useful, familiar and close to home. Rather than chasing scale or speed, Fairfax Corner is interested in slower forms of exchange. A place to buy something carefully chosen, pause for tea, meet a neighbour, discover a maker, or simply feel that the street still has life in it.
Fairfax Corner helps demonstrate how small buildings can support community life without needing to become formal community centres. It is a soft civic space. A place where enterprise, hospitality and local belonging overlap.
Buttercup
Providing a civic room where people can meet, share ideas and exchange knowledge in an informal setting. Upstairs, a set of small flexible rooms supports creative work, gatherings and future uses as the initiative evolves.
Buttercup is a community and gathering space in Knaresborough, created to support everyday connection, conversation and local resilience. It offers the kind of informal civic space that many towns need more of: somewhere warm, accessible and familiar, where people can meet without pressure and where ideas can begin naturally around a table.
At ground level, Buttercup provides a welcoming public room for coffee, conversation, events and community activity. It is intentionally simple and human in scale. A place for meeting, listening, sharing knowledge and building relationships across different groups and generations.
Upstairs, a set of small flexible rooms gives the project room to grow. These spaces can support creative work, meetings, workshops, quiet activity and future community uses as needs emerge.
Buttercup acts as one of the organisation’s physical anchors. It shows how a modest building can become a platform for community life, not through grand gestures, but through regular presence, hospitality and trust.
Green Futures Fair
Providing a civic room where people can meet, share ideas and exchange knowledge in an informal setting. Upstairs, a set of small flexible rooms supports creative work, gatherings and future uses as the initiative evolves.
Buttercup is a community and gathering space in Knaresborough, created to support everyday connection, conversation and local resilience. It offers the kind of informal civic space that many towns need more of: somewhere warm, accessible and familiar, where people can meet without pressure and where ideas can begin naturally around a table.
At ground level, Buttercup provides a welcoming public room for coffee, conversation, events and community activity. It is intentionally simple and human in scale. A place for meeting, listening, sharing knowledge and building relationships across different groups and generations.
Upstairs, a set of small flexible rooms gives the project room to grow. These spaces can support creative work, meetings, workshops, quiet activity and future community uses as needs emerge.
Buttercup acts as one of the organisation’s physical anchors. It shows how a modest building can become a platform for community life, not through grand gestures, but through regular presence, hospitality and trust.
