Yvonne Wallace smiles as she takes a moment to soak up the stillness of a sunny morning beneath Yarm Viaduct. "This," she says as she stands on True Lovers' Walk, "is what we're fighting for."

The businesswoman has lived in Yarm for 45 years and says she has seen "lots of change". Plans have come and gone, but one lit a fire of campaigning zeal for the Leven Park resident which shows no signs of dying out.

She says the outline proposals from Taylor Wimpey for up to 600 homes on land east of Holdenfields Farm, Green Lane, Yarm were "like a red rag to a bull. It was the straw that broke the camel's back.

"When I heard about it I thought, 'How on earth?' I just thought, enough's enough."

The developer argues it is a "relatively modest" number of two to five-bedroom homes, including up

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