The secret spa: venturing inside Sheffield’s strangest heritage building

Tucked away in a verdant valley in eastern Sheffield is an historic building like no other. One of the only spring-fed plunge pools left in the country, when it opened in the mid-nineteenth century Birley Spa bathhouse was named “nature’s masterpiece”. Of course, none of the residents of Hackenthorpe are taking to the waters these days, but the spa is still there, just about.

Fiona Milne has been coming here for 40 years. Now 61, she first encountered it when she moved to Frecheville in her early 20s. On one of her first walks around the area she stumbled upon the long forgotten Victorian bathhouse. It was love at first sight. “As soon as I discovered it, I just thought it was amazing,” she says.

I meet Fiona in the car park, and we head in. You can pretty quickly see what decades of non-use have done to the place. “We don’t have the keys to the upper floor,” Fiona says. “Not that you’d want to go up there, because there’s a fair chance that you’d end up on the lower floor.”

Walking around the abandoned site is a strange and more than a little unsettling experience. It’s very dark, firstly, as the heavy wooden blinds on the windows no longer open, meaning our photographer Andy Brown has to fetch his flash equipment from the car so we can get some half decent shots. Chunks of plaster, fallen from the ceiling, lie in big piles on the floor. Then there’s the room full of mannequins — some naked, others dressed in Victorian bathing clothes, like something out of a particularly traumatic episode of Doctor Who.

The pool room, though, is perhaps even stranger. I can smell the damp, and hear the sound of running water — but the pool itself is an empty void. It used to capture the water from the spring to fill it up, and even a year ago it was full of fresh water. But Fiona tells me that the old rubber plug disintegrated, meaning that the spring now just runs into the plunge pool, down the gently sloping bottom, and out the other side.

When we finally get some light in, the ghosts of the past can be seen everywhere. A heraldic crest is painted on one wall (Pie Repone Te — “rest in pious confidence”) while a polystyrene life buoy ring perches on another just in case the pool ever fills up again. Outside, it looks like the building itself is slowly being absorbed back into nature with vines covering the walls.

If the bathhouse itself is a bit spooky, the lush woodland which surrounds it is magnificent. Fiona tells me the grounds are rich in nature, including foxes, badgers, hedgehogs and grass snakes. There are also countless birds of prey including buzzards and tawny owls, and they are sometimes visited by kingfishers who often overwinter here. In the riot of high summer, it feels like a secret valley, untouched by the outside world.

I’m here now because the building has just been put on the Victorian Society’s heritage at risk register for the first time, making it one of the most endangered 19th century buildings in the country. Despite its condition, Griff Rhys Jones, the president of the Victorian Society, says it doesn’t take much imagination to see that Birley Spa could “easily be a fascinating attraction and a destination” once again. “I love it,” he adds.

"I'm the gob"

Opened in 1843, Birley Spa was of its times. The idea of “taking the waters” in places like Buxton or Matlock Bath had been popular among the well off for more than a century, but the Victorians democratised it. The supposedly restorative power of this spring had been recognised for hundreds of years, but the 2nd Earl Manvers was the first to try to monetise it. An advert for the spa that year claimed bathing in its waters could alleviate anything from rheumatism, gout, and lumbago (back pain) to debility (weakness caused by illness or aging) and scorbutic (scurvy). However, despite the spring’s purported miracle health benefits, the bathhouse never became a financial success.

In the following century, the building served as a pub and a hotel, before it was turned into two cottages in the mid-1880s. The bathhouse remained open throughout this time but closed at the outbreak of the Second World War. It never reopened. There was one attempt to restore it to its former glory, in 1998, when it won £250,000 from the Heritage Lottery Fund (match-funded by Sheffield council to make a pot of half a million pounds). However, after the building reopened in 2002, a failure to find a new use for it meant that this wasn’t sustained. In 2018 Sheffield council tried to sell it, leading to an outcry from the community and the creation of the Birley Spa Preservation Trust, which Fiona now leads.

After discovering the bathhouse in the mid-80s, she brought her children here regularly when they were growing up. “We used to come down here all the time when they were little,” she tells me. “We’d bring a picnic down. They would have their jelly sandals on and they would paddle up and down the stream all day.”

More than anyone, she is now the face of Birley Spa. Countless appearances on BBC Radio Sheffield and most recently a package on BBC Look North have seen to that. “I’m the gob,” she laughs. The Birley Spa Preservation Trust is ostensibly more than 3,000 strong on Facebook but in reality there are about half a dozen hardcore volunteers, who hold work days twice a month.

I ask Fiona about the council’s previous attempt to sell. “Someone emailed the council and asked what is happening with Birley Spa,” she explains. “They said nobody’s bothered about it, the community don’t care about it, we’re going to sell it.” Wrong on all counts — the news led to public meetings, protests and backing from Sheffield South East MP Clive Betts. Just a few days before it was due to be auctioned, the council said it was being withdrawn from sale.

There are some critics on social media who believe that rather than save the Birley Spa, this has instead condemned it to further deterioration. But Fiona says they were never aware of any serious interest in the site and believes that a Grade II-listed building which you have to open to the public at least once a year would never be attractive enough to a developer with one eye on the bottom line. “The only person who would want to live in it is me,” she jokes.

The trust are working on another Heritage Lottery Fund bid, but they’re in a Catch-22. They don’t own the site, which makes it hard to get funds. But without funds, they’ll struggle to get ownership. In an attempt to break the deadlock, the council have now agreed to give the trust a letter that they can show to the big funding organisations, saying the council intend to give them a conditional lease once they have all the reports and business plans in place.

In the meantime the Birley Spa has continued to deteriorate. When it was withdrawn from auction, Fiona says the council promised the trust support to develop a business plan and money for repairs. While some money has been made available for repairs, this is a drop in the ocean when compared with the investment the building needs. They needed a new front door to stop water getting in but had to make do with sandbags. It was finally replaced when some local youths kicked it in, but not before the water had made the upper floor unsafe to step on. In terms of the business plan, Fiona says they are still waiting for the long-promised support.

Over the last year or so, Fiona tells me the level of engagement they have got from the council has improved. She says the people at the top now seem to care about heritage in a way the previous administration didn’t, and the committee system means that more voices are heard in the decision making process. In 2021 Sheffield council CEO Kate Josephs came to see the site. “Most people just say ‘wow’ when they see the plunge pool, but she just looked furious that such a building has been allowed to decay so badly,” Fiona says.

Hacked off

The question that the trust often ask themselves is: why was this allowed to happen? Why has such a gem of the city’s heritage been treated with so little love? The spa was listed back in 1973, so it certainly wasn’t ignorance of its value. Could it possibly be that it has been left to decay because it’s in Hackenthorpe? “We had been chastised for saying that,” says Fiona. “But some people from Dore and Totley who came to one of the first Heritage Open Days we ran said ‘this would have never been allowed to happen where we live’. We had always been told you can’t say that but they just came right out with it.”

Robin Hughes from Hallamshire Historic Building thinks Birley Spa could have been a victim of a view of heritage focused on a few “star assets”. But he adds that Sheffield council's previous lack of a vision for the city's heritage — sometimes appearing as hostility in the past — may also have played a part.

Whatever the reasons, if it is ever to succeed it needs a way of making money. Could they get a new plug and reopen the pool? Cold water swimming is very big at the moment. It might not heal your lumbago, but the spring comes through at a chilly 11.3 degrees, making it perfect for those who seek out invigorating dips. Swimmers from SOuP (Sheffield Outdoor Plungers) have shown interest and a survey has shown that people would be willing to pay if they can get the plunge pool working again. If they can add a cafe where people can get a coffee and a cake, Fiona thinks it could easily attract enough people to pay for its own upkeep.

As I leave, I walk past half a dozen young men sweeping the front of the building as part of their community service. Fiona says the “community payback team” have been a great help and even put in a new path last month. But she's well aware that it’ll take more than the work of a few committed volunteers and some low-level lawbreakers before Sheffielders can take to the waters of Birley Spa again.