It seems Mark Pawson, a 59-year-old driving instructor and a director of Middlewood Lodge Management Company, is starting to regret speaking to me. He hopes I’m impartial, he tells me, but he’s also heard from one of his fellow directors that I might be “working for them”. He knows I returned to the building the day after our hours-long chat about the alleged campaign to oust him as director and he knows who I have been talking to. “I have got people in here who tell me things. I have got spies in their camp who might not be what they seem,” he says. “What they don’t realise is I have got a lot of allies in here.”
When he talks about “them,” I can only assume he is referring to a group of four other leaseholders in the building who, earlier this month, called an Extraordinary General Meeting of the management company. On 8th March, the owners of all 38 flats in Middlewood Lodge, a converted Victorian hospital building in Wadsley Park, will be invited to vote on which leaseholders should sit on the board of directors and thus steer how the building’s property management agent, Omnia, spends everyone’s annual service charge. It’s an unpaid volunteer position, and seemingly a tiring and thankless job, but a number of residents are keen to secure a seat at the table.
These insurgents are, according to Mark, desperate to get rid of him, despite everything he has done for Middlewood Lodge over the years. “I don’t get anything out of it, other than I live here and want to make the place better,” he says, mournfully. He puts me in touch with a leaseholder who doesn’t live in the building, 61-year-old Gurinder Singh, but is effusively complimentary about Pawson’s influence on it. “Four years ago the building really was in a terrible state,” Singh tells me. “Since then, there’s been this remarkable uplift, which obviously, at the same time, has enhanced the value of the property.”
Nobody I speak to seems to deny that Middlewood Lodge is broadly well-maintained, even if they disagree with some of the current board’s choices. Rather, the general thrust of the complaints from those unhappy with Pawson is that he — the only board member who lives in the building, and the one everyone agrees is running the show — is making it impossible to enjoy their beautiful home, because he insists on ruling it with an iron fist. Andrea Cooper, a 55-year-old leaseholder and one of the four that called for the EGM, says she worries how he’ll react if they successfully vote him off the board. But, at the same time: “He has to be called out, we can’t live like this.”
Another leaseholder, who asked to remain anonymous, says they were baffled to discover there had been all this resentment festering in the building. A flurry of “vague allegations and passive-aggressive social media posts” has only made them more confused. They’ve never had any personal problems with Pawson, but the fact that a number of other people seem to is making them worried they’ve missed something crucial. “I suspect this kind of infighting is common in any building where people have to get along, but the amount of politicking here is a bit alarming,” they tell me. “I wish I knew how to get to some kind of truth.”
The truth, it seems, is not easy to come by at Middlewood Lodge. Singh, for example, insists the ultimate cause of all the trouble is a single leaseholder, who has “been attacking Mark and making slanderous accusations,” although he refuses to detail what these are. “Unfortunately he’s created a little band of followers,” he says. “He and the others should simply get on with life and follow the rules.”
If you read any other local newspapers, you might already be familiar with the alleged troublemaker in question. Philip Strafford is a 46-year-old leaseholder and former director of Middlewood Lodge Management Company, as well as Pawson's nemesis-in-chief. In recent months, both men have reported the other to South Yorkshire Police, although without pressing charges.
Pawson tells me they have only spoken in person twice in the past three years — which is not to say they haven’t been on each other’s minds. “He is obsessed with me, I must be living in his head rent-free,” Pawson says of Strafford. Though he insists the other man is “not on his radar,” it’s clear that, if Strafford is truly fixated, it is very much mutual. At one point, he suggests that a report about him to South Yorkshire Police made by another tenant, who also did not press charges, “were set up” by the other man. “If he rattles my cage with allegations and slander, I’m going to bite,” he tells me.
When I come across Strafford in the hallway outside his flat, holding his pomeranian Poppy under one arm, it’s obvious he is not Pawson’s biggest fan, not least because he exclusively refers to him by his full name. “Mark Pawson lives in a very strange world,” he claims. For the year and a bit they sat on the board together, he found him “very undemocratic” and difficult to work with. “Whenever you said no to anything, he would throw his toys out the pram.”
Pawson and Strafford have been butting heads for four years now, and the latest addition to their laundry list of conflicts was Pawson’s — or rather the board’s — decision to have three mature trees on the grounds cut down. As has already been hashed out in the local press, the board’s argument was that the trees were in danger of falling over and damaging someone’s property or even person. The counterargument from some residents, led by Strafford, was that they only had Pawson’s word that an arborist had advised him to have the trees removed, since there was no written report to that effect.
Both sides of this conflict insist they felt very strongly about these trees. “Those trees saw King George V when he visited the wartime hospital here in 1915 and now they have gone,” Strafford told the Yorkshire Post. Pawson, meanwhile, claims he had leaseholders “living in fear” and simply had to act. To those uninvolved in the scuffle, neither party seems convincing. “This thing about the trees doesn’t seem like the real issue,” the anonymous leaseholder says. “It seems to be a distraction from whatever the actual issue is.”
According to Pawson, it all started (as so many blood feuds surely do) with the decorative planters. The year was 2020, back when he and Strafford both sat on the board, alongside Adrian Arksey and Barry Kitchen, who remain on the board to this day, and Katy Kelly, a 43-year-old single mum who still lives in the building but later resigned from her role. According to Kelly, Pawson and Strafford got on fine at first but “quite quickly, it became difficult… both in meetings and outside of the meetings”. Pawson, she suggests, is “very used to having his own way” but then, she concedes when I ask, Strafford could be headstrong too.
Pawson remembers spending £600 on a dozen large concrete planters to decorate the outside of the building — “what a bargain,” he remarks. Strafford did not approve, saying he worried they could topple over and hurt someone. “Everyone else didn’t have any negative feedback, it was only from him,” Pawson says. “That led to us not talking, more or less just after that.”
Pawson says this pattern, of Strafford “saying no for the sake of it,” repeated itself with a number of his other ideas to spruce up the building — and I can imagine there were quite a few. Having seen his flat, which is full of little decorative touches like a wicker heart hanging on one wall, he has an obvious passion for making things look nice. It’s actually quite endearing to meet a single man of his age who proudly mentions that he gets a lot of compliments on his decor. However, Strafford denies that he was merely “being awkward and difficult,” as Pawson seems to believe. He maintains he said no to many of the other man’s ideas “because half the time it was ludicrous what he wanted to do”.
Both Pawson and Strafford are men with very defined, but wildly different, aesthetics. Pawson’s flat is dominated by the grey-beige — or “greige” — colour scheme that has become a mainstream interior design trend in recent years. Strafford, meanwhile, loves Art Deco so much that he has an A3 photograph of himself in the staircase of the Midland Hotel in Morecambe framed on his wall. While I wouldn’t want to suggest that Strafford’s fears about the planters being unsafe were insincere — he tells me a childhood friend of his was crushed to death by a planter — it’s easy to imagine that some of his objections to other ideas pitched by Pawson might have been down to a clash between their personal tastes.
Whatever the reason, it’s clear Pawson didn’t enjoy having Strafford on the board, pooh-poohing all his plans. Luckily for him, in January 2021, he was handed an opportunity to get rid of him. He shows me an email to Omnia written by another resident in the building, complaining that Strafford had a “personal vendetta” against her and her autistic son, who was terrified of his pomeranian Poppy. She alleged that Strafford was deliberately walking Poppy outside her flat to upset her child.
Pawson immediately threw a gauntlet down and asked Strafford to resign. He would not permit Middlewood Lodge to have “a director that seems to be antagonising a young autistic child on purpose,” he says. Strafford found this ridiculous. He couldn't do anything about the fact that Poppy upset the child — other than keeping her on a leash, which she was — although he says he’s made sure to keep her away from the woman’s flat since. Nevertheless, he agreed to step down.
His resignation did nothing to extinguish their rivalry. If anything, their spats only got more acrimonious. When Pawson recommended that Omnia employ his then-girlfriend to clean the building, Strafford objected that it was a conflict of interest and went to Omnia’s office, in person, to inspect the invoices paid to her for any evidence of wrongdoing. When Strafford asked to be compensated after having his broken boiler replaced, alleging the damage was caused by a leak in the roof, his request was denied by Omnia; a decision he seems to feel Pawson had a hand in. (Having been shown communication from Omnia to Pawson about the boiler, I am not too sure.)
He also seems to regret his decision and Kelly’s simultaneous decision to step down as directors. Arksey and Kitchen seem happy to let Pawson do what he wants, essentially making Middlewood Lodge his personal fiefdom. “If Mark Pawson wants it, he gets it,” he tells me. “He thinks it benefits everybody, really it just benefits him.” Strafford would like there to be a few more voices involved in deciding how their service charge is spent. “Middlewood Lodge should be a democracy, not a dictatorship,” he says, before adding proudly: “There’s a quote for you.”
Kitchen might contest the idea that he gives Pawson carte blanche — he is, he tells me, “well up to speed with everything what’s happening” despite having lived in Spain for the better part of a decade. Still, it seems to him a “no brainer” that Pawson should continue as director. “If you’re an owner, like I am, you want someone like Mark that lives there and who has got the best interests of the property in mind.” In his opinion, Strafford and his allies want to get on the board “for all the wrong reasons,” such as a desire to “park two cars”. It is clear, from the way he talks about it, that this point about parking is of particular concern. “If you let these people park where they want whenever they want,” he says, “then, before you know it, you will be overrun with cars.”
Middlewood Lodge has 43 parking spaces on its grounds: one for each flat, an additional one for Pawson’s flat — a quirk that predates his arrival to the building in 2018 — and four spaces for visitors. Since July 2020, despite the fact that the car park is inside a gated community, a parking enforcement company called Excel Parking has been hired to ensure they are used correctly. Excel regularly hands out £100 fines to residents who do not park in their personally allocated space or visitors who do not have a properly filled-out permit displayed.
According to Neil Hargreaves, a 53-year-old tenant who works in the music industry, the introduction of parking fines is just one of many little ways the building has become “more and more formal and clinical” since Pawson took charge. “There’s been quite a few residents who have had relations come round, or even nurses, who have got fined,” Hargreaves says, which he feels is highly unnecessary. One of the residents that has been repeatedly burned by these parking fines is Cooper; she is almost certain it was Pawson that dobbed her in each time. “He spies on people’s cars and that’s unnerving to me,” she claims. “He’s a real stickler for rules.” Though he doesn’t have a car himself, Strafford also alleges this. “He’s on the phone straight away as soon as he sees anything untoward, he can’t just be relaxed.”
Pawson surprises me by immediately confirming he snitches on his neighbours to Excel Parking. He sees nothing contentious about this behaviour. “It’s part of my job,” he insists, adding that other leaseholders have also complained in the past. Before Excel Parking was hired, he alleges, “it was horrendous, with cars parking everywhere,” which could have been dangerous if they blocked emergency services from reaching the building in a crisis. It’s not his fault that a minority who refuse to follow the rules believe this makes him “the biggest bastard in the world”.
Cooper, despite what Pawson and his allies claim, insists her involvement in calling for the EGM was “not at all” about revenge for the fines. She wants Pawson off the board, she tells me, because she finds his behaviour highly concerning. So much so that, on 25th January, she reported him to South Yorkshire Police for harassment, following a confrontation in the car park, where she alleges he told her to “get ready”. When contacted by The Tribune, a SYP spokesperson confirmed “an investigation was launched” but that “the complainant did not support a prosecution”.
Pawson insists she was not genuinely scared of him, as she tells me she was; she simply didn’t like what he had to say. I ask him if perhaps he, as a tall, bald man, might be a more daunting figure than he realises but he rejects this suggestion. “I’m a big guy,” he says, “but I’m a nice guy.” Based on my interviews with other people, I suspect this might not always be coming across. Hargreaves, for example, insists he can be imposing. “I don’t know if he’s not got that self-awareness about it or if he doesn’t care,” he says. Even Kitchen, Pawson’s ally, concedes he possibly “comes over a bit unapproachable” to some people.
The police report, in Pawson’s eyes, was merely a strategic move to damage his reputation. After all, even though it went nowhere, his critics were able to tell other residents he had been “under investigation” by the police, which he claims they promptly did. “I could say you were hassling me and the police could get in touch with you,” he tells me, “and then I would be entitled to say there’s been an investigation about you.” What he has learned since living at Middlewood Lodge, he adds, “is the amount of people that will play the victim”. After we speak, Strafford tells me his elderly mother plans to report Pawson to the police as well, because he has just driven past and stuck two fingers up at her.
It does seem, in Pawson’s defence, that some of his neighbours are a little quick to believe the worst of him. More than one person points me to a news article from 2001 about a man named Mark Pawson going to jail for twelve months for attacking his ex-girlfriend with a pitchfork. The only problem is that it categorically cannot be the same man — he is four years younger than Pawson would have been at the time, according to the birth year listed for him on Companies House. When I point this out to one of the people who sent me a link to the article, they immediately suggest it might still be him, as the “press can be wrong”.
The more I hear, the harder it is to imagine that the hostility at Middlewood Lodge will ever be put to rest, especially given everyone I speak to tells me they have absolutely no plans to move. Few people involved in the fracas even seem to be considering an amicable resolution, still too wounded by past slights. Only Kelly, who hopes the rest of the renegade faction will “tread really carefully” and acknowledge Pawson has done some great work at the EGM, seems to me genuinely willing to work with him on the board. “If he wants to,” she adds.
Hargreaves, by far the most long-term resident I speak to, would love to see things die down, although as a non-leaseholder he cannot join the board or vote. Back when he started renting his flat in 2009, he tells me, “the building had a great community feel”. Every summer the front lawn would be full of residents having picnics or playing rounders, although sadly there’s none of that now. “People don’t really invite each other round as much as they used to because of the personal politics going on,” he adds.
All this, regretfully, may do little to help my anonymous leaseholder friend, as they prepare for the EGM in two weeks time. They’re being asked to make a choice that they know will affect the future of their home but they, like me, are struggling to work out who to trust. Is Pawson some kind of homegrown despot? “I’ve never seen him be intimidating, although he is quite full-on,” they say. “I guess I have not had occasion to disagree with him.” For what it’s worth, they’ve never received a single parking fine.
They ask me how I would vote, if I owned a flat in this beautiful building. (If you love interpersonal drama and green space, a two-bedroom is currently on the market for £150,000.) In my opinion, with the exception of Kelly, absolutely none of these people should be on the board; they seem fundamentally incapable of working together. The leaseholder can see my point. “This all sounds extremely petty,” they tell me. “No one seems to be coming out of it well.”
