Editor's Pick of the Week: Pub heaven, Ripon super-turds and the Battle of Station Parade

We have some great country pubs on our patch. Many, sadly, are struggling so it was heartening to read that the couple behind the two Storehouse venues in Ripon are to reopen the Crown Inn at Grewelthorpe, between Masham and Ripon, next month.

There was more good news on the pub front this week when it was announced The Office Ale House micropub was due to open at noon today (February 22) on Skipton Road, Bilton and an independent local brewery was to take over The Old Bell in Harrogate. I never understood why The Old Bell got rid of the sign above the table where former US President Bill Clinton once sat.

Not such a good week for public toilets, with the ones near the bus station in Ripon closed again. As before, the council attributed it to a ‘blockage’. Is this a case of misuse, or is Ripon becoming the home of super-turds as well as sinkholes?

I’ve probably written more stories about the Harrogate Station Gateway than is healthy. The one thing that galls me each time is the name given to the scheme. It’s about making the gateway to the town, i.e. the bus and train centre, more attractive but Station Gateway is not the kind of pithy descriptor that appeals to readers. After this week’s legal row turned up the heat, I think it should be renamed the Battle of Station Parade. Or, to give it a Trump spin, Make Station Parade Great Again.

We spend a fair bit of time poking around on the council website and trying to decipher council-speak.

But this one I stumbled across this week was on another level. It’s a notice about whether ‘to procure and support an enterprise data architecture solution for the council’ and if you can understand what it means, please let me know. Here’s a taster: ‘The Council are seeking a flexible platform to deliver data capabilities, e.g. ingestion, transformation, links to corporate presentation tools, governance, etc’. Pure gobbledegook.

At least there was some plain talking and salty language at last week’s meeting to set the budget, as insults flew around the council chamber in Northallerton. The action culminated in about 20 councillors walking out. “It was a farce and frankly embarrassing,” one councillor told us.

You can watch the meeting in full here but be warned — it lasts five-and-a-half hours. Spolier alert: scroll to 5 hours, 27 minutes in to watch the walk out.