They were just about to get the beers in when suddenly the community on the Staynor Hall estate in Selby were told the Jubilee is cancelled!
Now though, the event has been saved in the nick of time.
The celebration was arranged for this Friday afternoon (3 June) at the new Staynor Hall Community Centre, recently used for the elections.
But then YorkMix was told that Persimmon withdrew permission to use the hall for legal reasons. The builder still owns the site after various delays in handing it over to the community.
At lunchtime today the property company told the organising committee they had solved the legal problem.
Committee member, Ben Anderson said: “We had all the picnic and street party stuff ready and had set up the competitions, like fancy dress and the best of British type things and we were all ready to go.
“A massive blow to all of us, especially as the volunteers organising it all had taken the end of this week off to sort stuff out and basically we were at the point of buying all the beer and everything for the bar.”
He said the situation changed at lunchtime as Persimmon rang to say the problems were now sorted. But Ben says in a way that was a bit late as they had cancelled everything by then so a lot of work was needed to get things moving again.
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Happily, this message came through at 3.45pm: “Following a lot of calls, emails, and frantic running about, the committee have managed to pull this back, Persimmon has allowed us to use the hall.
Anna-Marie McGlanaghey, the chair of the committee, added that there had been confusion initially when they were told they could use the hall and while it was nobody’s fault it had caused a lot of stress.
However she said that Persimmon had worked hard to sort the issues out today and even made a donation to funds so everyone was happy now.