Campaigners are celebrating after winning a battle to save a village's last allotment site from being turned into a housing estate.

Residents in Quorn have been opposing a plan to develop 35 privately-owned allotment plots off Loughborough Road.

Planning officers at Charnwood Borough Council have now refused developers Moore, Herbert, Moore permission to put 21 homes on the two-and-a-half-acre site.

More than 150 villagers wrote to the council objecting to the scheme and planners said the loss of the allotments would remove a valuable area of open space and harm badgers.

Campaign for the Protection of Rural England spokesman and Quorn villager Graham Stocks said: "This is a huge victory for the village and hopefully now any plans to develop that site will be kicked well into touch.

"It has been realised this site holds far more value for the village as open space and allotments than it does as housing."

Mr Stocks called on Quorn Parish Council to compulsorily purchase the land from the collection of freeholders and turn it into publicly available allotments to meet a waiting list of more than 50 people.

Parish councillor Terry Stirling said he was pleased the scheme had been rejected.

He said: "We have lost half a dozen allotment sites in the village to housing over the years and a line has finally been drawn to say no more.

"I have always said that area is the village's lung. Without it there is the danger the village could become one big urban sprawl – one big housing estate.

"We do have a long waiting list for allotments and we will have to consider any opportunities to acquire the land.

"The land should not just be left as it is, doing nothing. I would like to see the village school become involved in cultivating an allotment.

"I'm also pleased because I believe the refusal will stop the flooding problems in the centre of the village getting worse.

"Inevitably when you concrete over land next to a brook you increase the speed at which water gets into it and that would have added to the flood problems."

The developer had argued just a handful of the allotments were in use, with most of the area overgrown and likely to stay that way.

David Haynes, agent for Moore, Herbert, Moore, said he was disappointed by the refusal.

He said: "We will have to consider whether we appeal or whether we look at some less controversial option for the site.

"Very few of the plots are cultivated and many are owned by absentee people from across the country. They realised they could get thousands of pounds for them as potential development land and not so much as by renting them out as allotments."