After a decade of neglect, can Batemoor hope again?

It’s the hottest day of the year so far and I’m walking round the Costa del Batemoor, going door to door like a Jehovah’s Witness, in order to spread the good news. Given half the neighbourhood seems to be sitting on their front steps soaking up the sun — while lager and lollies positively fly out of the shops — I could have saved myself a lot of time and effort if I’d had it printed on a sign to wear around my neck. But, oh well, here it is: Jordanthorpe and Batemoor, two south Sheffield estates, are collectively to be one of the UK’s 25 “trailblazer neighbourhoods”.

If you’ve spent much time there — although given it’s a place most Sheffielders will only catch a glimpse of as they whizz past on the A61, there’s every chance you haven’t — that may come as a bit of a surprise. Good weather usually makes anywhere look nice but, with bits of Batemoor, even the sun has got its work cut out for it. Most of the poverty in Sheffield tends to be in the east of the city but the Jordanthorpe, Batemoor and Lowedges estates in the south west (often lumped together by locals as “LBJ”) buck that trend. According to the 2021 Census, almost 70% of the households in Jordanthorpe and Batemoor are deprived in at least one of four ways (education, employment, health and housing). In some parts of Batemoor, more than one in 20 households are deprived in all four areas, making it one of the most impoverished places in the country.

But this is precisely why the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government identified Batemoor and Jordanthorpe as a “trailblazer” last week. The trail it hopes to nudge them into blazing, with the help of up to £20 million over the next decade, is one out of deprivation and into prosperity. According to an announcement on the government’s website, the money “will support communities to drive forward the changes they want to see in their neighbourhoods,” paying for improvements that “people can see on their doorstep”.

You’d expect people to be ecstatic. Paul Severn — a 59-year-old wearing shorts, a t-shirt and a baseball cap on his head at a jaunty angle — mostly seems incredulous that the place he lives is about to receive such largesse, although he has no doubts that it needs it. But, to be honest, he’s clearly got other things on his mind.

“Them lads over there are causing me a bit of grief,” he whispers. He’s referring to a group who are standing across the road from us, discretely pointing them out as he lights and relights a rollie nervously in his hand. Paul lives in a Batemoor flat block that used to be exclusively for older people but is now open to all ages; he claims this mix of generations in the same building is often a recipe for disaster. 

At this distance, it’s difficult to tell whether the group in question are actually looking at us or not and, in the interests of putting Paul’s mind at ease, I offer to go over and explain why I’m here. Paul all but pleads with me not to. “Have you got all you need now,” he mumbles — not so much a question as an excuse — as he quickly scuttles away. 

Whether he was actually being intimidated or not is hard to tell, but the fact that he feels that way is telling in itself. Go a few hundred metres further south from the estates and you’re in North East Derbyshire, with its quaint villages and rolling fields. But where I am feels a world away.

Every Batemoor resident I speak to complains about masked youths riding motorcycles at high speed around roads of the estate and in Batemoor Park. It’s clearly a nuisance, but it’s the area’s drug problem that is far more concerning. I watch as a man accompanied by his partner and two children, one of whom is in a pram, meets a dealer to score in one of the maisonette block underpasses. Later, at the Jordanthorpe shops, I see a woman walk out of the Post Office with a handful of cash only to give some of it straight to a man, who surreptitiously gives her something in return.

Other than anti-social behaviour, the main complaint anyone seems to have about Batemoor is the quality of the housing. The neighbourhood has three main housing types: flats like the ones lived in by Paul, maisonettes, and houses. Standing outside her front door on the bottom floor of one of the maisonette blocks is Kathleen Davies, 71. She’s originally a Londoner, born on the Old Kent Road itself, but says the locals have accepted her well enough. As she smokes a cigarette watching one of her three rescue cats play on the grass, she points to the concrete awning above her flat, which is slowly crumbling and in desperate need of a lick of paint. “I’ve told the council no end of times it needs doing,” she says. Kathleen says her flat is “pretty good” inside, but the property next door needs so much work doing to do it can’t currently be let out. “It was so bad that the previous tenant refused to pay his rent, so he got kicked out,” she adds.

Originally farmland, the estate was built in the early 1960s to house people moved out of inadequate Victorian housing nearer the centre of town. In the last 65 years, the story of Batemoor and Jordanthorpe has mirrored Sheffield’s: a period of postwar optimism, followed by decades of industrial decline, topped off with 15 years of grinding austerity. Some investment did take place in the area in the 2000s, as part of the then-government’s Decent Homes programme, improving the kitchens, bathrooms, heating and insulation in council homes to ensure they met a minimum standard. However, while welcome, this work wasn’t sustained. Much of it is now needs doing again.

Sarah Harris, 48, is born and bred Batemoor and currently lives in one of the rows of prefabricated terraces wedged between the flats and maisonettes. She says the houses themselves are nice and spacious; the problem is that the council can’t keep up with repairs. Recently, she waited three months for someone to fix a light in her bathroom before she gave up and did it herself. 

Furthermore, she tells me there is little for children and young people to do in the area, probably one of many reasons the local youths resort to more illicit thrills. “When I was younger they had youth clubs,” she adds. “If they still had them the kids would have something to do; they would be off the streets and they wouldn't be destroying stuff and messing around.”

Sarah isn’t alone in feeling like Batemoor is no longer the community it once was — it’s a refrain I hear repeatedly during the day. In the past, the area had two pubs, the Jordanthorpe and the Batemoor, as well as the Boundary Club, which football teams and youth clubs could use. The pubs are now gone, one taken over by the church and the other turned into a Premier convenience store, while the club was burned down in 2022. “When I was little everybody knew each other, everybody got on with each other, everybody stuck together; the community was brilliant,” Sarah adds.

The Batemoor and Jordanthorpe Community Centre is a squat, brick-built building just off Dyche Lane, the road that bisects the two estates. They open every weekday as a community cafe, which offers cheap meals and also has a soft play area where children can play for just £1 an hour. After the cafe closes at 2pm, the building becomes a respite centre for children with additional needs.

Centre manager Joanne North tells me they do all this via fundraising and don't get a penny from the council. However, she says that, as well as all their other responsibilities, the centre is increasingly having to feed local people for free. One particularly heartbreaking case involved a nine year old girl whose mum couldn’t afford any presents or even a cake to give her daughter on her birthday. Staff at the centre bought the girl a cake, a card and a few bits for the mum to give to her daughter, but it was a stark illustration of just how little some on the estate have. “We all live in the area and know the struggles,” adds Joanne's colleague Cheryl Symonds. “I’ve used a foodbank, so I know what it’s like when you're on your arse.”

Cheryl says poor housing, anti-social behavior and a lack of police are the three main problems Batemoor faces. But, beneath these more practical concerns, there is also a sense that the area has been forgotten, that out here on the edge of Sheffield, they don't matter as much as other places and investment will happen almost anywhere else before it happens here. “Sheffield has all these plans, ‘we're going to do this and we’re going to do that’,” she says. “But as soon as people around here see council workers, one, they think they're coming up for rent money, or two, they are coming up to complain about something. A lot of people have given up.”

The “trailblazer” money, which the government says will begin to flow in April next year, can be spent on anything from youth clubs, libraries, community grocers, cultural venues, and health and wellbeing services. Welcoming the news on her Facebook page, the area’s MP Louise Haigh said the communities here had shown “incredible resilience in the face of over a decade of neglect, and it’s right they now get the support they deserve.”

Cheryl and Joanne did see the announcement on Louise Haigh’s Facebook page, but they admit to being sceptical about whether it will make much of a difference. Rather than addressing the deep-seated problems of poor housing and multi-generational poverty, they suspect a lot of the money will go on cosmetic improvements such as the murals, painted shutters and flower beds that have recently appeared at the Jordanthorpe precinct. “This estate needs a lot of things,” adds Joanne. “More flowers is not one of them.”

Sarah Harris is also sceptical. Batemoor has endured a torrid time over the past half century and like many, she has been disappointed before. But there is also hope. “When I was little this was just somewhere I lived,” she says. “Now I’ve got kids of my own I want better for them.”