Flaxby

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Flaxby is a small village and civil parish in North Yorkshire, England. It sits near the A1(M) motorway, about 2 miles east of Knaresborough, and had a population of 156 in 2011.

Historically, Flaxby was part of the Claro wapentake and, until 1974, belonged to the West Riding of Yorkshire. From 1974 to 2023 it was in the Borough of Harrogate; it is now administered by the unitary North Yorkshire Council. The local ecclesiastical parish is Goldsborough (St Mary).

In 1994 archaeologists found an Early Iron Age farmstead dating to the 7th–6th centuries BC near Flaxby, but the site was abandoned until the late Roman period.

The name Flaxby comes from the Old English personal name Flatr and the Old Norse bȳ, meaning village.

Development plans have been proposed to the east of Flaxby, north of the A59 and west of the A1(M), for a project called Flaxby Park. This would create about 2,500–3,000 homes on around 440 acres, plus a primary school, medical centre, leisure facilities, shops and pubs, a bus park-and-ride, and possibly a new railway station on the York–Harrogate line. A separate idea for a railway station at Flaxby Moor (south of the A59) was studied in 2014, but the feasibility suggested low demand.

In 2017, Harrogate Borough Council chose a housing scheme at nearby Cattal (Maltkiln) over Flaxby.

Ilke Homes opened a modular-house factory at Flaxby in December 2018, opened by Communities Secretary James Brokenshire. The factory closed in June 2023 just before the company went into administration, with more than 1,100 jobs lost.