Green-tech provides soft landscaping materials for stunning new leisure facility

The old Knaresborough Pool had been a popular destination with families from Knaresborough and the surrounding Harrogate for thirty years, until it was decided to close the conventional pool and replace it with the £17.6m wider leisure and fitness facility. The new leisure centre, run by the council’s health and wellbeing company Brimhams Active, offers a new 25m 6-lane pool, fitness centre, sauna and steam rooms, as well as a café and outdoor children’s play area. It has also been designed with energy efficiency front of mind, the old gas boiler being replaced by air source heat pumps and solar panels, helping to reduce carbon emissions from the old building by 60%.

The landscaping contract was awarded to Yorkshire-based Gavin Jones Ltd, one of the UK’s leading landscape providers. Part of the Nurture Group and holder of the Royal Warrant for landscape maintenance, Gavin Jones provides landscape construction services across the UK, working with landscape architects, main contractors and suppliers. Green-tech and Gavin Jones have enjoyed a successful working partnership for nearly twenty years.

Part of the leisure centre scheme involved landscaping the area around the centre, involving predominantly soft landscaping, as well as car park planting and the installation of an outdoor play area.

Thirty-eight trees were planted around the site in soft landscape, with Green-tech supplying all the required stakes with crossbars, along with rubber tree belting and blocks to hold the tree stable during its establishment phase and prevent tree rubbing from wind movement.

Drought is still the number one cause of newly transplanted trees failing, even when planted in soft beds, so it is vital to allow for a simple and reliable method of irrigation, and importantly, ensure a maintenance plan is in place to keep the trees watered. Green-tech supplied Mona Relief Grande irrigation rings for each, allowing the maintenance teams to water the trees quickly and efficiently as required via easily accessible filler pipes. The Mona Relief rings are tried and tested, quick to install and long-lasting. They are available in ring diameters from 1.25m to 8m, with double or single air/water inlet pipes.

Over 300 tonnes of Green-tech’s British Standard, manufactured topsoil was supplied along with bioretention soil, Rootmaster compost, and 27,000 litres of Ornamental bark. For the play area, RootZone 60/40 soil was used to provide a free-draining build-up under the surface finish.

Alasdair Innes – Specification Advisor- Green-tech:

Planting trees in soft is a major part of Green-tech’s business and it is always good to see large areas of soft landscaping in urban areas. We have worked with Gavin Jones for many years, and we can always rely on them to deliver great looking schemes, which the new Knaresborough Leisure Centre certainly is.