Is Little Kelham a big mess?

When the first homes in Little Kelham — a development which Exposed Magazine once gushingly described as the “biggest thing to ever happen to Kelham Island” — went on the market, Simon Berry remembers people “queuing up overnight” to register their interest. “It almost went a bit viral in the beginning.” To secure his own flat, the 45-year-old quantity surveyor paid to join a special mailing list that let him bid for properties before the general public, a £1,500 fee that was knocked off the price of his deposit once he signed. 

He’s not the only one that fell head over heels for the dream of picturesque, socially-conscious living in an up-and-coming neighbourhood, sold to him by award-winning developer Citu. Andy Woolley, a 38-year-old who bought his flat in late 2018, begrudgingly admits that the marketing for Little Kelham was “quite clever,” adding: “I just bought into the whole way of life, shall we say.” One of his neighbours, Nicola Jukes-Harris, remembers attending a cello recital at Kelham Island Museum while the scheme was under construction and thinking it “looked really funky and interesting.” Like many early adopters, she was particularly attracted by the promise of environmentally-friendly housing. “I’m a big eco-warrior,” she says. 

In a sales brochure from 2021, Citu boasted about “drawing on Scandinavian and European designs,” an influence you can easily spot strolling about the neighbourhood, with its pedestrianised spaces, open air seating and sawtooth roofs that evoke the area’s recent industrial past. While some find this aesthetic a bit overdone — “It looks quite Grand Design-y,” as one local bartender put it — it certainly distinguishes Kelham Island from anywhere else in Sheffield. Three years ago, The Sunday Times crowned the area one of the “best places to live in the UK,” in an article that features a slightly younger and less embittered Andy. “The neighbourhood has such a great vibe and I’m proud to be part of such an amazing and edgy place,” he told the Sunday Times. “There are around 15 to 20 independent bars and cafés within a ten-minute walk of my Citu apartment.”

These days, Andy is far less chuffed with his Citu apartment. Though he’s planning to stay put for now, he tells me a lot of his neighbours “just want to get out of here and put it behind them”. One of them was Simon. After deciding he’d finally had enough last Christmas, he was in the middle of trying to sell his flat when the heating system malfunctioned — as it had done so many times before — causing a catastrophic leak in his property. “A contractor came and cut a hole in my living room floor, and it’s been there for three months,” he says. “The management company keeps telling me there’s nothing they can do and that I’ll need my whole floor replaced. It’s almost like a full-time job chasing them up.”

Over several visits to this up-market, buzzy housing development — a scheme whose success was allegedly a major factor in Citu being picked to lead the regeneration of Attercliffe — I hear the same complaints over and over again. Everyone I speak to tells me their move-in date was inexplicably delayed, often for months, and that they arrived in their new home to find several important jobs had been botched. Andy, for example, says his fridge and freezer had not been connected, something it took five days to have fixed, while Simon’s dishwasher is still non-functional eight years after he moved in. “I think everyone has a list of fixes as long as their arm,” he says bitterly. “To be honest, I’ve just lost the energy for it and accepted things won’t get done.” To add insult to injury, residents say their service charge has risen astronomically over the years, for unclear reasons. 

When contacted by The Tribune, a Citu spokesperson did not deny that many of the homes in Little Kelham were plagued by delays and “snagging issues”, although they insisted this was down to the “different supply chain partners” hired to build them between 2014 and 2020. “Since then, Citu has developed its own method of delivery with an offsite manufacturing facility, which is now being used for Central Kelham.” 

They also admit that, in the years since, “response times and some maintenance standards have not always been acceptable,” which is why Citu appointed the latest in a string of management companies, Form, earlier this year. However, they add, “a significant number of residents have not paid their service charges, which has made it difficult for the managing agent to deliver consistent services”. The developer is working with a group of “newly-appointed Residents Directors” to “break this cycle and recover the unpaid charges”. 

This won’t be an easy task. Of all the promises Citu founder Chris Thompson made about Little Kelham all those years ago, the only one everyone agrees has come true is that residents would be joining that special thing: a community. “The only good thing they’ve done is bring us together, just not in the way they thought they would,” Andy says bitterly. As one of his fellow homeowners, Susanne Szabo, puts it: “A common enemy brings people together, and it really has here.”

In retrospect, many Little Kelhamites now realise, the alarm bills should have started ringing even before they moved in.