It started as a carnival and ended in confusion.

At 1pm, a jazz trio were striking up tunes outside Harrogate Civic Centre. Soon up to 100 people were milling and spirits were high. 

There was a child dressed as a fox, a man dressed as a pigeon and Sarah Gibbs, who has fought every inch of this battle, in her trademark tree costume.

Six members of Extinction Rebellion Harrogate, with red robes and white faces, then appeared and Dame Judi Dench sent a last-minute message of support.

They were there to make their feelings known about Harrogate Spring Water’s plans to fell 500 trees in a section of the Pinewoods known as Rotary Wood to expand its bottling factory.

Rarely has a Harrogate demonstration attracted so many people and when the civic centre opened shortly before 2pm, people flooded in to watch North Yorkshire Council’s Harrogate and Knaresborough planning committee adjudicate.

Three of the seven committee members — Cllrs Paul Haslam, Hannah Gostlow and Robert Windass — were absent.

Cllr Matt Walker stood in for Cllr Gostlow, but the other two seats were empty, which meant the decision weighed on him along with Cllrs Chris Aldred, John Mann, Peter Lacey and Philip Broadbank.

They and five officials at the meeting were all male.

In a report ahead of the meeting, council case officer Gerard Walsh had urged the councillors to approve the application. 

Mr Walsh wasn’t present, but his stand-in John Worthington batted away the councillors’ questions, saying repeatedly that their concerns had either been addressed in 2017 when the application was given outline planning permission or had been resolved this time.

This reserved matters application, he said, could only consider access, appearance, landscape, layout and scale.

None of the councillors seemed to want to approve the plans, but the prospect of a costly legal battle looms like the sword of Damocles over councillors’ heads.

The public, in an adjoining room with a narrow entrance to the council chamber, felt distant but sporadically made their feelings known.

Neil Hind, chairman of Pinewoods Conservation Group, a charity that manages the Pinewoods, Cllr Michael Schofield, whose division includes the proposed site, and Cllr Arnold Warneken all spoke against the plans.

Then Richard Hall, managing director of Harrogate Spring Water, which is part of French multi-national Danone, was given five minutes to state the company’s case. When he said, “we are a small, local business,” there was laughter and someone shouted “b*******”.

Mr Hall went on to say the scheme would create 50 jobs, and the company had addressed concerns by refining its plans and agreeing to plant 3,000 trees offsite. Eight hundred had already been planted, he said, “to demonstrate our good faith”.

But this was never going to be an easy gig for him and there was more laughter when he said the scheme had strong public support.

It looked like he was going to have the last laugh, however, when Cllr Mann declared that “regrettably, I find myself in a position of having no choice but to support” the project.

But his colleagues disagreed, citing concerns about the strength of commitments to mitigate the ecological impact and the absence of a Section 106 legal agreement signed by the council and the company stating what Harrogate Spring Water must pay to compensate the community for the development.

For a moment it looked like the councillors were going to reject the scheme but finally they agreed to support a proposal by committee chair Cllr Aldred to defer a decision pending more information.

Battles are not won by deferment and at the end, nobody from either side looked happy. There were cries from the public area of “how many more years of this, it’s ridiculous?”, “where’s the diversity?”, and “there’s no jobs on a dead planet”. The Harrogate Spring Water representatives looked deep in thought.

Cllr Schofield summed things up: “We’re going into extra time.” But how long it will last remains unknown.