Lakes and Dales 500sq mile Expansion

Visitors to two of England’s finest national parks are a step closer to having more to explore after recommendations to extend the boundaries of the Lake District and the Yorkshire Dales - which will increase their combined area by nearly 500sq kms - have been passed to Government for approval.

If the Secretary of State confirms the changes being recommended by Natural England it will represent the most significant addition to England’s National Parks since the confirmation of the South Downs in 2009.

After years of face-to-face and online consultations communities either side of the M6 artery that have until now sat outside both boundaries are a step closer to joining their near neighbours after over two thirds of those surveyed said were in favour of extending the National Parks.

The proposed variation to the Yorkshire Dales National Park will include:

to the north, parts of the Orton Fells, the northern Howgill Fells, Wild Boar Fell and Mallerstang; and
to the west, Barbon, Middleton, Casterton and Leck Fells, the River Lune and, part of Firbank Fell and other fells to the west of the river.

The proposed variation to the Lake District National Park will include:

to the east, an area from Birkbeck Fells Common to Whinfell Common; and
to the south an area from Helsington Barrows to Sizergh Fell, and part of the Lyth Valley.

David Butterworth, the Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority chief executive, added: “The farmers and landowners who, for generations, have lived and worked in these places have helped create the great natural beauty and many special qualities that visitors enjoy today – and that make the areas worthy of National Park status. 

“We believe these areas have many unifying features and characteristics such as the Settle Carlisle line, limestone pavements and hay meadows, as well as similar community issues such as affordable housing, access to services and sustainable communities – issues that resonate with the existing National Park.   

“As part of this process, Natural England has undertaken extensive consultation and we are delighted that it shows that the majority of residents who responded are enthusiastic about the proposals and recognise the many and varied benefits that designation will bring.

“It’s a real victory for common sense in looking at National Park boundaries in terms of the quality of the landscape rather than outmoded and short-term administrative or political issues.”

Poul Christensen, Chair of Natural England said: “The Board’s decision to proceed towards the designation of the Lake District and Yorkshire Dales National Parks is the result of many years of detailed assessment work and public consultation. It represents an important opportunity to ensure that these special landscapes are looked after for future generations to enjoy.

Picasso and Da Vinci in residence to regenerate Rotherham

Picasso and pals to star in Rotherham

Rotherham, whose recent headline grabbing initiatives include mums defying Jamie Oliver’s healthy eating regime by selling fast food through the school railings, is shrugging off its junk food associations and moving into the art world by re-launching itself as an open air gallery.

The south Yorkshire town is undergoing a visual transformation as over 60 pieces of artwork by local, national and world renowned artists are being reproduced on a grand scale – some 4m by 8m – and displayed on the side of buildings in over 35 town centre locations. Plans are for the gallery to be in place for a number of years with art trails being distributed in the local tourism information centre.

The initiative is the brainchild of the local business community who wanted to encourage more visitors to Rotherham to help regenerate the town centre and drive the local economy. A similar scheme ran in York a few years ago to critical acclaim.

The first installations from local artists have been going up this week and will sit alongside famous works by Picasso, Da Vinci, Cezanne, Castleford's-own Henry Moore, Van Gogh and Rousseau as well as works by local schools.

Nick Cragg, local entrepreneur and chair of the Rotherham Economy Board, who is spearheading the project, said: “Rotherham will be one of the first towns in the UK to have its own open air art gallery which is fantastic news and will help to play an important part in its regeneration and further economic growth. The pieces have been carefully selected so that we could exhibit works of world renowned masters, whilst providing a platform for Rotherham’s own artists, as well as local young people to display their work.”

He added: “Like all good galleries, this one will evolve and we hope to add new artwork in spring next year, with the project having secured funding to run for at least 18 months. We are hoping further private sponsorship will mean it can run for many years to come.”

The organisers have already partnered with some heavyweight art allies, the Yorkshire Sculpture Park and the Hepworth Gallery up the road in neighbouring Bretton and Wakefield as well as the National Gallery and will consult with the public on what other pieces of artwork local people would like to see reproduced when the display is reviewed and updated in spring next year.

Yorkshire prepares to reclaim Hockney

Hockney's six canvas Woldgate Woods in East Yorkshire

Bradford-born David Hockney is synonymous with Los Angeles and sunny California but all that is about to change as a new exhibition of his landscape paintings reclaims him for the county of his birth, Yorkshire.

David Hockney: A Bigger Picture opens in January at the Royal Academy of Arts in London and Hockney hopes the collection of new work, the majority of which has been painted in East Yorkshire where he lives when he is not in the Hollywood Hills, will be as iconic for Yorkshire as his infamous swimming pool paintings were for Los Angeles in the 1960s.

He said: “It’s a landscape I know from my childhood, it has meaning to me, but I never thought of it as a subject matter until 10 years ago when I realised, for me at my age, it was a terrific subject, a marvellous place.”

Adding: “It’s a lovely bit of England still, not spoilt very much.”

Over 150 works will be shown across the Royal Academy’s Main Galleries, including sketches, ipad drawings, video installations and giant paintings that span the width of the walls.

Such has been quality of the body of work produced that one of that exhibition’s curators Edith Devaney from the Royal Academy predicts Hockney will become forever associated with East Yorkshire just as fellow painter John Constable is with Suffolk.

Hockney makes for an unlikely tourism ambassador. He shot to fame as a leading light in the British Pop Art movement in the 1960s and moved to southern California shortly afterwards. He doesn’t like crowds of people, which is why the solitude of the Yorkshire Wolds is so appealing to him. The thought of a surge of tourists heading to Yorkshire to see the places depicted in his paintings fills him with a slight dread and yet the global attention this exhibition is bound to generate is almost guaranteed to attract art lovers from across the world to discover Hockney’s Yorkshire.

They’d be advised to set aside a few days as his influence spans the width of the county. He was born in the west and studied art at Bradford; Salts Mill in Saltaire still houses one of the finest collections of his work in the world, one he constantly adds to and updates. In the east, locations in the Yorkshire Wolds such as Kilham, Garrowby Hill and Thixendale are about to put on the map by the new exhibition, as will Bridlington on the Yorkshire coast, where he lives when he is not in California, and of which he said:

“I’ve been going to Bridlington for a long time I’ve spent over 30 Christmasses there [at the home of his mother and sister] and I never stayed in the winter that much as I thought it was too cold and too dark but the first time I did, I realised how beautiful the winter was, it was not black or white, it was not grey, in fact sometimes there was more colour than the summer.”

Hockney said he hoped that when the exhibition opened in January it would open people’s eyes to the beauty of spring and encourage people to look more at their changing surroundings. He might not like it very much but the exhibition might also result in him having to share his beloved East Yorkshire with more people than he is used to as the county reclaims one of its most famous sons.

The exhibition will run at the Royal Academy from 21 January 2012 to 9 April 2012.

Woolley Edge’s Top of the Stops

Woolley Edge South might seem an unlikely destination for next year’s summer holiday but it might be worth a visit following the news that it has just been awarded the top-rated service station in England for its coffee shop.

The national recognition for the last motorway services on the M1, just outside Wakefield, comes from a new star rating scheme launched by Visit England in conjunction with the Highways Agency and the five main operators of motorway services – Moto, Welcome Break, Roadchef, Extra and Westmorland.

Loved and loathed in equal measure the new scheme could mean British service stations are on the cusp of a revolution as, for the first first time, the public are able to see which of England’s network of 71 stations are worth a visit - according to Visit England’s assessors - and which are better to drive past.

Warwick, for example, is named as the best place to stop in England for toilets (3 stars), Tebay South is the best for family outside play area (4 stars) and Beaconsfield for internal comfort (4 stars). Meanwhile, businesspeople it seems are spoilt for choice as Strensham North and Donington Park share the accolade for business use (3 stars each).

Equally, it is hoped that the outing of those with just two stars will help improve quality and experience, improving the service in service stations nationally.

James Berresford, Visit England’s chief executive said: “It is important that the welcome visitors receive, and the quality of services on offer at motorway service areas adds to the visitor’s overall holiday experience.”

For stressed out mums and dads still recovering from this year’s summer holiday road trip the new star rating scheme could provide essential reading before every future family excursion.

A full list of star ratings is available at www.highways.gov.uk/knowledge/14986.aspx

Residents Rave about Festival on their doorstep

Muse, My Chemical Romance, Pulp and The Strokes will have an unlikely group of fans cheering them on this weekend as they headline Leeds Festival – some toddlers, a crown green bowling team and the TOFFS, Thorner Over Fifty-Fives.


The Festival, which attracts 75,000 people and is the north of England’s largest music festival, has these unlikely groupies because of the work it has been doing in the community since the festival switched to Bramham in 2003.


That move was prompted by violence which flared at the old Temple Newsam site in 2002 resulting in £250,000 worth of damage and 44 people being injured. The following year Leeds Festival arrived at its present home in Bramham Park and the organisers, Festival Republic, went on a charm offensive in the nearby villages of Bramham and Thorner to reassure residents.


The result has been that in the last nine years the Festival has provided £500,000 of funding towards community projects predominantly in historic Thorner and Bramham – such as the TOFFS, Mums & Tots and Thorner Bowling Club - they also provide free VIP weekend tickets to the surrounding village committees, which are sold to residents – substantially below the public price – to further boost their respective community funds for projects such as Bramham in Bloom and the renovation of village halls.

And so, an unlikely army of rock festival fans has spawned in picture postcard, honey coloured villages just
north of Leeds.

Sam Hooton, landlady of The Swan pub Bramham for the last 19 years said: “The Festival does wonderful things for the village and we have had no trouble at all. In nine years we have had one festivalgoer in the pub and they were looking for a cash machine, it’s not like when it was at Temple Newsam when they nicked shopping trolleys and liberated gerbils.”

Janette Chapman landlady of the only other pub in Bramham, the Red Lion is equally supportive. “We have only been in the pub for seven months but it’s been great for business. We have been busy for the last fortnight as the workmen who construct the stages and the fencing come into the village and we expect them to come back once the festival is over and they start taking everything down again.”


It might not be everyone’s ideal scenario – 75,000 people descending on your village for a three-day rock music festival – but the residents in Bramham and Thorner have learned to live in harmony with the event and no doubt Thorner Over Fifty-Fives will be rooting for its continued success this weekend, even if they haven’t heard of Matt Bellamy.

Ebor Festival in the Pink for Ladies

As the fall out from this month's pockets of unrest continued, York Racecourse put all economic and social worries to one side and had a riot of its own - only this time it was a riot of colour and, suitably for Ladies Day at the Ebor Festival, it was pink.

Pink dresses mixed with pink hats underneath the giant pink branding of the headline sponsor as glasses of champagne (pink optional) chinked winner after winner. The historic old Knavesmire blushed with pride as 30,000 people came together in August sunshine to meet, eat, drink and get merry.

No need for Facebook or Twitter feeds to create a flash mob crowd here, this was social networking of the old fashioned kind. Orderly queues were formed for the Champagne Lawn as the brass band led the percussion of glasses. Knights of the realm cast careful eyes over their equine assets, A-level students so recently graded, celebrated, and thousands upon thousands of well-dressed racegoers squeezed into tailored suits and favourite frocks to embrace the spirit of the day’s dressing up. Hats were a talking point, an edible horse made from Yorkshire produce another and the sight of a jovial Sir Alex Ferguson - despite having no winners - caused an afternoon stir amongst onlookers at the Parade Ring.

Behind the fashion and famous faces though, Ladies Day is big business. Without the festival – shifted to include a Saturday for the first time in the hope of attracting a new weekend audience – the city and the county would be a much poorer place. It is estimated that the racecourse contributes £58m to York businesses, benefitting everyone from taxi-drivers to hairdressers and, judging by the shoes on show, chemists for blister repair kits.

Nick Fazackerley, general manager of hospitality at the racecourse explained the demand his team has to cope with: “We have 30,000 bottles of champagne delivered for the festival and during Ladies Day we would expect to get through 8-10,000 bottles. We also have 100 kegs of Pimms delivered which contain 20,000 glasses and we’re expecting over 4,000 of those glasses to be drunk today. “In terms of hospitality Ladies Day is the biggest of the Festival with about 5,000 covers, there is not a spare seat in the house, everyone wants to be here for Ladies Day.”

As with all things horseracing, numbers are key and it looks like William Derby, the clerk of the course, is backing an odds on favourite. The Ebor Festival is definitely in the pink and with a new 93,000 attendance record this week, it looks like to could be blooming for years to come. 

Morecambe to Steal Some Northern Limelight

Dancing a jig of delight, Eric Morecambe

If the comedian Eric Morecambe were alive today he would probably be doing a familiar jig - you know the one, skipping with one hand behind his head and the other behind his back - at the news that Morecambe Bay is a step closer to becoming the next natural wonder of the north.

Morecambe (Eric that is) would probably argue that it already is. A keen ornithologist and fisherman, who took the town’s name as his own, he knew all about the 120 square miles of flat sands, the fish, the waders and wildfowl it attracts, but now a local protection group has cleared the first hurdle to securing £2m of Heritage Lottery Funding which will further raise the Bay’s profile and boost the local economy.

The Morecambe Bay Partnership’s Headlands to Headspace scheme – Eric might have helped with the wording of that – has been awarded a development fund grant of £100,000 to further their plans for the area which include protecting its natural diversity, celebrating its cultural heritage and raising awareness of its significance to the UK as a natural tourism attraction.

As the largest intertidal area in Britain - a wide horse shoe shaped mouth where four estuaries meet - the landscape is patchwork of saltmarshes, tidal islands, shingle and wetlands, surrounded by coastal towns stretching from Morecambe in Lancashire to Grange-over-Sands in Cumbria. The famous British painter J M W Turner appreciated the Bay’s unique light, yet it is often bypassed by modern-day tourists following Turner on their way to the Lake District. If the partnership get their way, that will change.

They hope to develop local railway stations as hubs to the Bay’s key sites which wiattracting more visitors into the area providing much needed additional income for the 200,000 people who live and work around the Bay. It also has plans to support education projects with an emphasis on the oral history of the area and the traditions of fishing as well as its maritime and combat history.

Susannah Bleakley who co-ordinated the bid on behalf of the partnership said:

“As the project develops, we want local people to learn about how special Morecambe Bay really is, to share our excitement and get involved in projects to look after the Bay.  We really hope that the significance of the Bay will be much better appreciated as we develop these projects over the coming years.”

Sara Hilton, head of Heritage Lottery Fund North West, said:

“This imaginative scheme will draw together the threads of proud cultural histories and precious natural heritage that permeate Morecambe Bay, aiming to create a future where local communities are directly involved in conservation activities whilst new opportunities are created for visitors from near and far to explore, enjoy and learn about this fascinating landscape.”

If successful, Eric’s memorial statue could be in danger of losing its status as one of the town’s leading attractions. Who knows what he would think about that but if ever there was a comedian used to sharing the limelight it was him, Morecambe and Morecambe though, doesn't have the same ring to it.