The footpath feud tearing Broomhall Park apart

It all started with the signs. “This land is privately owned by Sheffield Hallam University and all public access to or use of this land is by licence only which may be immediately cancelled at any time.”

To the residents of Broomhall Park, the signs that appeared at the entrances to Collegiate Campus in 2022 could hardly have been starker. Ever since Hallam took ownership of the campus from Sheffield City Council in 1992, the university had been viewed as a good neighbour. They had always maintained the campus well and seemed keen on keeping it open to the public. While the signs didn’t say Hallam were about to stop people accessing the campus, the blunt threat that one day they might still came as a shock.

Broomhall Park residents had enjoyed access to the campus for generations and had long assumed this would continue in perpetuity. “To suddenly think they could lose something that had long been regarded as a community asset got a lot of peoples backs up,” says Peter Burridge of the Broomhall Park Association, a local residents’ group.

Actually, no, it started five years earlier, when Hallam said they wanted to sell the site. If you’re not familiar, Collegiate Crescent is a pretty big bit of land, though you can miss it as you walk past the narrow end on Ecclesall Road. Hallam has never had a campus proper, but Collegiate Crescent is as close as it gets. 22.5 acres of prime land, mostly green, positioned next to some of the most popular spots in the city. To the west, the Botanical Gardens, to the north the well regarded King Edward VII school, to the south, Ecclesall Road, and to the east the city centre. It’s surrounded by Broomhall Park, a network of beautiful tree-lined boulevards filled with extremely grand Victorian houses. It’s an estate agent’s dream.

But in 2018 the university announced it was planning to sell up. There were understandable reasons — it was developing its city centre base, and maintaining a campus a few miles away made less and less sense. And of course, there was an awful lot of money tied up in this prime development site.

That made locals uneasy. You see, it isn’t just students who use the place. When we visited, dozens of people were walking across the matrix of footpaths that criss-cross the site, exercising their dogs or just enjoying the campus grounds. It’s indisputably a public space.

On Friday I meet Andy, a local architect, who is walking his inquisitive cocker spaniel across the campus. “A lot of people around here are upset about what Hallam is doing,” he says. “We’re happy for it to be developed but it needs to be kept open for local residents.”

That’s how residents see it. But that holds no legal weight. Once sold, there would be no guarantee that the public could keep using it. And so it was that the Broomhall Park Association sprung into action. If the land was going to be sold they had to find a way to still be able to get on there. And they had a good idea of where to start: footpaths.

The path of most resistance

In all there are almost 30 footpaths which criss-cross the campus site. Most link Collegiate Crescent with Broomgrove Road, allowing people to travel between Broomhall Park and The Groves, a collection of streets on the other side of the campus which all share the ‘grove’ suffix (Broomgrove, Eastgrove, Southgrove and Clarkegrove). A few longer footpaths run the length of the site, linking the busy Ecclesall Road in the south to Park Lane and Clarkehouse Road in the north. “It’s always been a pleasant, accessible, open space that everybody can use,” adds Dave Cottam, Broomhall Park Association chairman. “It’s like our own little park.”

Unfortunately for Hallam, perhaps, Cottam and his crew have the two things you most need if you wish to tackle the planning system: expertise and lots of time. Secretary Peter Burridge, who has lived on Victoria Road for the last 10 years, tells me the organisation is largely made up of retired professionals including multiple architects and former town planners. He himself is a retired university lecturer in econometrics. “There is a lot of savvy around,” he says.

So far they have had four paths authorised by the footpaths officer and are currently working on a fifth. They say they have now developed a good relationship with the council officer, but they still haven’t been able to have a grown up conversation with SHU. “Hallam has something called the Student Good Neighbour Forum,” he tells me. “But it’s not the students who have been the problem, it's the institution.”

The work of the group is undoubtedly making the sale less straightforward. Dave Cottam estimates that the site might be worth about £30m without restrictions, which could do an awful lot to help the university’s ailing finances. But the requirement to maintain a lot of paths, as well as 10 listed buildings and tree preservation orders mean any future developer won’t have carte blanche, in turn lowering what it’s worth.

And so, the university begun the fight back. Which is where the signs come in. Because to register a public right of way in England and Wales, you must prove that the footpath has been used “unencumbered” for 20 years. If there is such an encumbrance, such as a big pink sign saying it’s private land, then your case comes unstuck. There were no restrictions before 2022, and residents had used them for decades, so they clearly meet the criteria. But proving that is the difficult bit, and the new signs make the job even harder.

The saga has clearly soured the relationship between the university and residents. When we asked Hallam about the signs, they said, somewhat pointedly: “Although we did consult with resident groups on the detail and wording of the signage, if residents have concerns, they can raise them with us directly.” For his part, Burridge describes Hallam’s attitude as “evasive and petty”, although he stresses this is a personal view rather than the view of the association. 

“We just want them to speak to us,” says Cottam, who is prepared to keep putting in hefty footpath applications for as long as it takes. “We know we are never going to get all 30 paths but we just want assurance that we will still be able to use the site. That hasn’t come so we will carry on putting in the applications to register them as public rights of way.”

‘Ancient Greece in Northern England’

But there’s a bigger debate behind all of this, for which the footpath feud is a mere proxy war. Is the land, in its entirety, actually Hallam’s to sell? And to answer that, we have to go back to where this story really starts: the mid-19th century.

Broomhall Park was built between 1830 and 1851, as a place where well-heeled Sheffield industrialists could kick back and enjoy their success in life. Situated in the clean air of south west Sheffield, the imposing villas of the private, gated community were never going to be short of interest. As part of the exclusive new development, a secondary school was built on Collegiate Crescent, along with a headmaster’s house and an assortment of outbuildings. It still looks largely as it did in the 1830s. Robin Hughes of Hallamshire Historic Buildings tells me that it was an attempt to recreate an almost classical landscape amidst the dirt and smog of Victorian Sheffield: Ancient Greece brought to northern England. 

As Broomhall Park changed and the city’s great and good found even grander neighbourhoods to move to, the area gradually became less exclusive. By the end of the 19th century, the gated entrances had disappeared and a new breed of middle class arrivistes had moved in. The school closed in 1884 and in 1905, Collegiate School became the City of Sheffield Training College. This in turn became Sheffield Polytechnic in 1969. For most of its life, the school and its successor colleges were Sheffield Council property. However, when Hallam became one of the post-1992 new universities, they were gifted the freehold to the entire site, presumably as a recognition of the importance of the area to training the local population.

When we asked Sheffield City Council to provide the details of the deal by which the Collegiate Campus was transferred to Sheffield Hallam University in 1992, they said they weren’t able to. “It would take quite a bit of research to find that out,” one officer told us. They added that they didn’t want to comment on whether it was right that Hallam could profit from the sale of the campus but did say they were working with them on future plans for the site. When we asked Sheffield Hallam University whether they thought it was morally right that they should profit from land given to them by the city, they chose not to answer. 

But they did tell us that while some staff and students would be moving to the new city centre campus for the start of the next academic year, the Collegiate Campus would continue to host thousands of students and staff from the university’s health, wellbeing and life sciences department. As a result, “the campus will continue to be an important part of our estate for some time to come,” they said.

“In terms of longer-term plans for the campus, nothing has been agreed, and no decisions have yet been made,” the spokesperson added. “Work to consider options is at a very early stage.” Indeed — The Tribune understands that this week they have appointed planning consultants to work up what those options might be.

Many of those who worry about losing access to the site will oppose any sale (the BPA, for their part, stress that it’s access, not ownership, that bothers them). But there is an alternative point of view. Maybe putting a load of flats on Collegiate Campus is exactly what Ecclesall Road needs. 

Once described as the “Golden Mile” of Sheffield retail, it’s unlikely anyone would use that description today. In the area opposite the campus there are several boarded up units, including the former restaurant Honeycomb and the former nightclub Kettle Black.

At Spirals gift shop, the manager tells me she used to live in the area and says it was definitely more thriving in the past. “There are hardly any independent shops left and even the chains have gone now,” she says. She adds she isn’t aware what Hallam’s plans are for the area but says anything that brings more people in can only be a good thing. 

And at fashion store Oliver Bonas it’s a similar story. On Friday morning the shop is busy but the manager agrees that Ecclesall Road has “totally changed” over the last few years. In just the area near them, Fat Face and White Stuff have closed in recent years. “When we were told [Collegiate Campus] was closing we were quite worried,” she says. “We obviously wouldn’t want it to just stand empty. But if it was going to be used for something that brings people to the area we’d be happy.”

None of the buildings on the 22.5 acres of the Collegiate Campus site are currently used for housing. Looked at this way, this is perhaps the biggest single opportunity to add to the housing stock in west Sheffield, where there’s plenty of demand. You wouldn’t even need to build new buildings, just convert old ones (though admittedly that’s not straightforward). And once the new residents were spending their disposable cash on their local high street, you would expect some of those boarded up shops to get a new lease of life.

Three years on, and the signs are still there. But as I go closer to take a look, I can see part of the message has been meticulously covered over by a sticker in exactly the same shade of Hallam pink as the sign. Nervously looking back at the CCTV camera trained on me, I peel it back. “There are no public rights of way over this land,” it reads. 

Thanks to the actions of the BPA’s army of retired planning experts, that’s no longer true. But who exactly will benefit from one of Sheffield’s biggest development opportunities is still up for grabs.