Projects
Harrogate Spa Society
Creating a new culture of spa for Harrogate
Harrogate Spa Society is a cultural and civic initiative renewing Harrogate’s identity as Britain’s living spa. Rooted in the town’s mineral waters and its distinctive heritage of health, nature and pleasure, the Society brings these ideas into contemporary life through culture, place, participation and knowledge.
Through new ideas, partnerships and public programmes, it nurtures pride of place and opens up possibilities for Harrogate’s future. Its work includes Harrogate Cure, the public platform through which people can explore, experience and help shape the town’s evolving spa culture, alongside a growing archive of its history and ideas.
Green Futures Fair
Green Futures Fair brings nature, culture and community together in the heart of Knaresborough. Through talks, food, music, workshops, art and local action, it creates an open and welcoming space for people to explore how we might live more lightly, locally and in greater balance with the environment.
The fair makes environmental thinking feel social, creative and accessible. Rather than presenting the future as a distant problem, it brings practical ideas, local knowledge and collective imagination into one shared experience. Visitors can meet the people already making change, discover projects taking place across the area and find new ways to become involved.
Alongside stalls and conversation, the programme uses performance, making and participation to reach beyond the usual environmental audience. It recognises that culture has an important role in changing how people see, feel and act, and that meaningful action often begins through curiosity, connection and a sense of possibility.
Rooted in Knaresborough and open to all, Green Futures Fair is designed as a growing platform for exchange and collaboration. It brings different generations, organisations and communities together, helping new relationships, ideas and future projects to emerge.
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.
Knaresborough Forest Park
Knaresborough Forest Park began as a campaign to protect, connect and give new purpose to a significant landscape on the edge of the town. We were one of the founding partners, helping shape the original idea, establish its public identity and communicate a clear vision for what the landscape could become.
Our role brought together visioning, communications and campaigning. We developed the narrative and campaign materials, built public awareness, organised guided walks and activities, and worked with partners to turn a broad ambition into a credible and visible public project.
We supported fundraising, partnership-building and the work needed to secure land. The project was conceived as a connected landscape of woodland, paths, habitats and community access surrounding Knaresborough.
After one year of campaigning, we handed Long Lands Common became part of the story later, as a neighbouring community-led project and partner that could help support land acquisition and long-term stewardship. It strengthened the wider movement, but followed the original establishment of the Forest Park vision and campaign.
The project demonstrates how strong ideas, public communication and collective action can transform an overlooked landscape into a recognised cause, building the support and structures needed to protect it for the future.
