Who killed the Sheffield Ski Village?

I’m standing outside an enormous detached house in Ranmoor, which covers more than 7,000 square feet and has eight vehicles — including an Aston Martin and what appears to be a race car — parked outside, in the hopes of solving an enduring local mystery. Who killed off the Sheffield Ski Village?

Built in 1988 for £2.5 million by John Fleetham, the Sheffield Ski Village was at one point believed to be the largest artificial slope in Europe. At the height of its popularity, it reportedly received 180,000 visitors a year and even kickstarted the skiing careers of several future British Olympians. This is despite the fact that the hill it sits on, Parkwood Springs, is a far cry from Mount Olympus. Looming over Kelham Island, it was once home to a rubbish tip which processed industrial waste. When it was finally closed by Sheffield Council, the surrounding land was thoroughly contaminated, one of many reasons the area has long been deemed unsuitable for new homes.

But for skiing, and later snowboarding? For that, it was wonderful. Back then, skiing had mainstream appeal — thanks in part to the hit show BBC 2 Ski Sunday — but hopping on a flight to hit the slopes was a far more prohibitive expense than it is today. Artificial slopes were a way to get your thrills on the cheap, in your own back yard. The earliest, including most of Sheffield Ski Village, were made out of a material called Dendix: a hexagonal mat of plastic bristles secured in a metal grid, which had to be constantly lubricated via a sprinkler system. Dendix felt close enough to snow to help people practice for the actual slopes, although it was far less forgiving to anyone who toppled over. “If you fall on Dendix, it’s like falling on hairbrushes,” a former SSV ski instructor tells me.

That wasn’t enough to put people off until the early 2000s, when skiing holidays in Europe became cheaper and “snow domes” — indoor ski slopes with genuine snow — were popping up nearby in Manchester and Castleford. Peter Shipston, 51-year-old founder of the Revive Sheffield Ski Village campaign, says the original owners were keen to build their own indoor slope in 2004 — “there was a model of it in the reception and everyone was excited” — but that the “sums didn’t add up”. Unable to compete with the genuine article, the Ski Village’s popularity began to decline and in 2007, just shy of two decades since he opened the slope, founder John Fleetham admitted defeat. “Then Kevin Pullan got it for a song,” Peter says.

Kevin Pullan, a 70-year-old property developer who wears his shoulder-length grey hair in a neat ponytail, seems surprised, but not outwardly alarmed, to find a journalist on his doorstep in Ranmoor. His house was, he later tells me with evident pride, previously owned by a member of the Viners cutlery family and a former chairman of Sheffield Wednesday; Pullan bought it in 2003 for more than £1.2 million. That was with money from his main business as a housebuilder, he’s very keen to point out, not with profits from the Ski Village. “Anyone who thinks money was made hand over fist out of the Ski Village is wrong,” he insists. “It was worth every penny — it made money, but it was hard work.”

In the early hours of Sunday, 29th April 2012, all Pullan’s hard work over the five years he ran the Ski Village was abruptly wiped out. A fire, which began shortly before 1am, destroyed the main building. At the time, the Ski Village’s general manager told the BBC that staff were “absolutely gutted” by this shocking turn of events. “The business has been running very well and we were due to be nearly full with children's parties,” she said. “For us, this is very difficult.” In the years that followed, there have been so many smaller fires at the Ski Village that its combustibility has become something of a city-wide inside joke, but there is no doubt that it was this fire that April that struck the killing blow. 

So what happened that night? An initial report on the fire by South Yorkshire Fire & Rescue — obtained via Freedom of Information request — has very little light to shed. Under “caused by,” the report simply states “not known”. Source of ignition? Not known. Item mainly responsible for the spread? Not known. All it can reveal is that the fire began in a “meeting room,” before deeming the entire disaster “accidental”. 

As it turns out, even this threadbare account conflicts with Pullan’s own theory. Though we’re discussing an event from 13 years ago, he’s able to remember that weekend with amazing clarity, down to recounting the phone call during which the manager first told him there’d been a fire. Until the moment he showed up on Monday morning, he tells me, he’d assumed it was no big deal. The Ski Village had long struggled with teenagers breaking in to cause havoc overnight, pilfering alcohol from the bar and setting small, relatively harmless fires on the hillside. But it was immediately clear, from the smoldering wreckage and the fact the Fire Brigade wouldn’t let him anywhere near, that this was very different.

His staff may have been gutted — one former employee tells me it’s “devastating to see a massive part of your childhood go up in flames” — but Pullan remembers taking the sudden destruction of what he repeatedly calls his “vanity project” on the chin. “It was probably ‘oh well’ within the time it took to have a cup of tea,” he says. “I collared the manager and said we needed to sort the redundancies out next week because this place is not going to be opening.”

My attempt to get the full report out of the Fire Brigade hits a dead end. Strangely, it's no longer available (“to the best of my knowledge, there is no retention period for fire investigation reports,” a spokesperson informs me). Pullan claims they eventually concluded the cause was an electrical fault in the basement. “The Fire Brigade has its own theories,” he says, mildly. He, and many others, have their own.