Locals call it the “Loxley alp”: a looming mound in one of the most beautiful valleys in Sheffield. As I walk up Long Lane towards Wadsley and Loxley Common, the earthwork rises like the foothills of a mountain, some 30 feet high. They’re meant to be building a golf driving range here. At the moment, it looks more like the surface of the moon.
I’m here with Joanne Lee, chair of the Friends of the Loxley Valley. Over the last two years, she’s seen this site change from lush green fields into the heap of dirt, brick, tile and concrete we now see before us. As we trek towards it, trucks carrying full loads to be added to the pile thunder past, making us take refuge on the verge for safety. The site is bordered by an intermittent line of scraggly looking leylandii conifers, presumably a half-hearted attempt to shield the tip from view. The plastic netting they were once wrapped in now lies strewn around the area.
As we reach the junction of Long Lane with Myers Lane, Joanne points out the road surface, broken up by the cumulative strain of hundreds of lorries. From 7am until 4pm most days, the traffic is unbearable, she says. (While I’m there, at least 25 pass in under an hour.) The company logos on their sides suggest they’re coming from miles around — Doncaster, Wakefield and Ripon — and many don’t have covers, meaning they spill mud onto the road. A street sweeper drives up and down the road trying to keep the dirt to a minimum, like Sisyphus with his boulder. I’m splattered by every vehicle that drives past.
Joanne says the work is a blight on one of the most beautiful places in Sheffield. “I’ve got friends who won’t come here,” she says. “From across the valley it looks awful.” It has been six years since planning permission for this big pile of dirt was granted, on the basis that it would be used to remodel the golf facility. Since then, however, locals have started to suspect the council was misled. Joanne feels that nobody is checking that the operators of the site are sticking to what they agreed. “It just feels like this is a long way from what was promised,” she adds.
Joanne isn’t alone. To many people in the Loxley valley, what was billed as the necessary precursor to a golfer's paradise is beginning to look like something different: a tip. This raises an important question. Did the owners look at waste and see a way of creating new, improved golf facilities in Loxley? Or did they have a golf course and see its potential for making a ton of money as a landfill?
Joanne first told me about the 'Loxley alp' a few weeks ago, after reading our article about the Hagues: a very wealthy, very fractious family in Bradfield, who have been in the business of waste disposal for more than 50 years. That story detailed the family’s dubious business practices, including illegal waste dumping in Burngreave, as well as their fall-out into two warring factions. In Joanne’s email, she told me about the troublesome landfill at Loxley Driving Range, as well as its supposed ownership — the Hague family, through their company Hague Plant Ltd.
However, after days of poring over public records about the site, it emerges this story is not so simple. Contrary to popular belief in the area, the Hagues do not own, operate or have exclusive use of the facility. The full story of Loxley Driving Range is long and complicated, stretching back 11 years.
Planning permission to remodel the driving range was first granted in 2015, after an application by then-owner Chris Manthorpe. This application was granted by the council a year later, but with a number of conditions imposed, which meant work could not start straight away. Perhaps frustrated by the lack of progress, Chris sold the site to local entrepreneur Simon England in late 2017.
Two years later, the council’s planning department received an application in relation to the site from a familiar name — Hague Plant Ltd. Rather than new plans, this application was a bid to fulfill the aforementioned planning conditions on behalf of the owner, so that development could proceed. Essentially, Hague Plant Ltd would import a huge amount of waste material onto the site, which would then be flattened to create the new facility.
This 2019 application was refused. The council planning officers’ report stated that they had “serious concerns” about the proposal to dump 77,000 cubic metres of inert waste, saying the applicant’s assertion that this would equate to 138,600 tonnes were “a little vague”. The report added officers believed the plans amounted to a “thinly-veiled means of depositing waste material on this site, rather than a means of securing improvements to the golf driving range facility as approved”. Interestingly, a similar scheme proposed by the owners of nearby Hillsborough Golf Course in 2018 was turned down for the same reasons.
However, when Hague Plant resubmitted their proposal in 2020, it was approved, despite the amount of inert waste increasing 123,907 cubic metres or 136,297 tonnes. Since planning permission expires if work doesn’t begin — usually within a period of three years, although this can be extended — perhaps the council feared refusal would kill the project. Or perhaps they felt their hands were tied. The officers’ report noted that while the importation of waste onto the site was permitted under the original 2016 planning permission, the control of imported material was outside the council’s jurisdiction, falling instead to the Environment Agency.
This report also recommended that three directives be attached to the approval. One was that the council should be regularly updated (bi-annually at minimum) on the volume of material deposited, along with how many times trucks had come and gone. Another was that the development should be carried out in three phases, with each phase fully completed before the next began. And, finally, the third was that lorries should approach the site from the south (using Penistone Road, Holme Lane, Malin Bridge, Loxley Road, and Long Lane).
Of these three directives, the council say they are unable to comment on the first two, due to a number of ongoing enforcement investigations related to the site. However, Joanne Lee tells me she knows the third is regularly ignored, with dozens of lorries a day arriving at the site from the north, through the small country lanes of nearby Worrall.
The 2019 and 2020 applications are presumably why most people in Loxley believe that Hague Plant owns or operates the tip at the driving range. But, while the applications were made by Hague Plant with a view to operating a tip, no waste was ever brought there by the firm.
Hi, Dan here. When we did our major story about the Hague family earlier this month, we had an inkling it might lead to some more. So, when long-term Tribune reader Joanne Lees got in touch with us with some interesting new information about them, we knew we had to follow it up. That lead sent us to a driving range in Loxley that locals believed was being used as a landfill, and a week-long search for answers about who was really behind it.
This is the kind of reporting The Tribune specialises in: dogged, tenacious, determined. It’s the kind of reporting that is increasingly rare in local news, but one we are trying to bring back. Since I launched The Tribune in 2021, we’ve amassed more than 35,000 readers, an astonishing number for a title that was launched less than five years ago. If you want to join them, and get two free editions of The Tribune every week, hit the button below.
In 2024, the Environment Agency permit that Hague Plant had successfully applied for to dump waste at the site was transferred to a new company: Loxley Driving Range Property Ltd. By this point, ownership of the site had also passed from Simon England to three new people: Wes Robinson, his brother Steven Robinson, and Arun Thomas Singh. (The Tribune has been told that the Robinson brothers are in fact Simon England’s stepsons, while Singh is an entrepreneur linked to the Sheffield-based taxi company City Taxis.) Shortly after the permit was transferred in May 2024, tipping operations began.
When the planning permission was granted to Hague Plant in 2020, the officers' report said that the re-profiling works would require depositing 136,297 tonnes of inert waste onto the site. Based on a load of 20 tonnes per lorry (6,814 lorry loads in total) and 100 loads per week (20 loads per day), the work would be completed in 1.4 years. However, recent Environment Agency figures for the site indicate that just 7,000 tonnes of material was dumped in the first half of 2025. At this rate, the Loxley alp will take almost 10 years to reach its final form.
Unsurprisingly, residents are furious. Last year, Joanne wrote to council planning officer Marcus Young, beseeching him to do something. His reply suggests he believed, wrongly, that Hague Plant was responsible for the tipping operations at the site. “For myself, I would be interested to see whether the haulage contractor (Hague Plant Limited) has breached the permit, and if so what action the EA will seek to take,” he writes.
Young wrote to the Environment Agency to express his interest in this matter. When they responded, a man named Nonny, who says he is the “regulatory officer for Loxley Golf club” [sic], stated the site has a permit to dump 48,125 tonnes a year. “The permit does not have an end date, which means the activities can continue as long as they have to reprofile the site,” he adds. While this may be true from the Environment Agency’s standpoint, it is a far cry from the 1.4 years that Hague Plant promised in their planning application to Sheffield council. It seems reasonable to question if the application would have been approved had the council known.
An Environment Agency report says they visited the site last October, after reports from the local authority that the waste levels on site were too high. The report states that the height of “the wedge” (the main earthwork) was 10 metres, while the waste mass (the portion of the waste not yet spread onto the site) was an additional five metres. The report concluded that no “non-compliances” were observed on site during the inspection, however, it also notes that the inspection was done at a time when there were no activities on site.
After multiple emails and messages to Loxley Driving Range go unanswered, I try to track the owners down myself. First, in the hopes he can put me in touch with his stepsons, I go to Simon England’s house in Oughtibridge. The woman who answers the door informs me he’s at his second home in Norfolk and, when I explain why I’m there, feels compelled to defend the driving range project. “I know people are complaining about the trucks at the moment but it’ll look lovely when it’s done,” she insists. As for his stepsons Wes and Steven, she tells me I’ll be able to find them at their beloved driving range, as they’re always there.
Walking onto the site, I can hear a few balls being thwacked, but the clubhouse is deserted. Eventually, a young man appears behind the bar. When I ask if I can speak to the Robinsons, he tells me the brothers are “never there”. Shall I come back another time, I ask. “There’s no point,” he replies.
This unfortunately means my unanswered questions are piled up high enough to rival the Loxley alp itself. Why, if Hague Plant successfully applied to tip at the site in 2020, did they not hop to it? What was the nature of the agreement between Hague Plant and Loxley Driving Range in 2024, when the Environment Agency permit was transferred to the Robinsons?
A representative of Hague Plant told us the company had invested “significant time and resources in discharging planning conditions and securing the waste permit over a number of years”. They added that a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) set up between themselves and the owners of Loxley Driving Range meant the nature of any financial relationship between the two was confidential.
When The Tribune contacted the Environment Agency, they said they had made 21 regulatory interventions since they issued a permit for the site in 2019, and would continue to monitor the site. However, they added that responsibility for the height of the finished development, the landscaping, the routing of HGVs and wider traffic matters sits with the council, not with the EA. Sheffield council, on their part, told us: “The site is subject to a number of ongoing enforcement investigations seeking to establish if there has been a breach of planning control."
In the absence of any concrete answers, questions will continue to be asked about the true purpose of the tipping operations at the driving range. In the meantime, the people of Loxley are left with an eyesore, causing a huge impact to a beautiful green belt area, with no end in sight.
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