YORK’S Mount School has hit back after a local resident accused it of wrongly trying to build a house in a garden given in memory of Quaker Joseph Rowntree.

The Quaker school has applied to City of York Council for permission to build the house on land off Love Lane.

But neighbour Derek Ferguson has criticised the move, referring to a plaque in the garden which states that Rowntree was a “wise and generous friend of the school… The trustees have given this garden in affectionate memory of him. March 1948.”

He said in a letter to the council: “I would have hoped that a Quaker school such as The Mount would like to preserve the memory of someone who did so much good for it. It is wrong to sell off something which was given in trust.

“I believe that to authorise this development would confirm the trend for the Mount to sell off its land for housing, as happened at the Mount Vale Drive/Towton Avenue site.”

He also objected to loss of privacy for local residents, increased traffic congestion in Love Lane and the design of the proposed house.

But school bursar Julie Davis claimed today the plaque was misleading, saying it referred to an area of land where the house of the headmistress had been built in the 1970s.

She said: “The proposed development is actually on the site of the old greenhouses.” She said the land where the house was now being planned had been bought by the school in 1932, and the Rowntree Memorial Trust had merely helped pay for it to be landscaped in the 1940s.

She confirmed the school had sold two other plots of land over the past eight years to help fund sixth form facilities. She said: “Developing our land responsibly and environmentally to raise funds to develop the school’s pupil facilities is not new or radical.”

She said if planning permission was now granted for the house, money raised would be invested in sports facilities. The school had considered carefully adjoining properties, and planned a high degree of screening.