The Tribune’s best of 2025

It’s been a big year for The Tribune. Over the last 12 months we’ve added a fourth staff member and published some of our biggest investigations ever. We thought we’d take the opportunity of the “Chrimbo Limbo” to look back at some of our most memorable stories of 2025. Below, each of our four writers picks their top three stories of the year. They include everything from major investigations to hard-hitting interviews and quirky human interest pieces. Have a read of ours and let us know what your favourite was in the comments.

Dan Hayes

A London lawyer bought hundreds of Sheffield freeholds. Then the ‘very aggressive’ letters arrived. The Tribune’s story of the year is undoubtedly Andrew Milne, the London solicitor who has been busy buying hundreds of freeholds and then demanding tens of thousands of pounds from homeowners in return. It’s the story which has had the biggest impact of any we’ve done by far, being picked up by national media including Private Eye and the BBC. When it first came to our attention I don't think any of us knew that it would take off the way it did, but thanks to heroic reporting (mainly by my colleague Daniel Timms but eventually including Mill Media reporters across four cities), we finally landed the big fish that we had been looking for. What will happen next in the saga? Keep reading The Tribune next year to find out.

Who killed the Sheffield Ski Village? Every city has one great mystery; a foundational question that becomes part of its mythology. In Sheffield, that mystery is: who started the Ski Village fire? Eyebrows were raised when the ski village first arrived in the city, but the attraction turned out to be remarkably successful. That was, until, the early hours of Sunday, 29th April 2012, when the whole place went up in fiery oblivion. Ever since there have been rumours about who started the fire and why. However, in June this year, Victoria tried to finally solve that mystery, tracking down the Ski Village’s former owner Kevin Pullan and asking him direct: did you burn it down to claim the insurance money?

Parrot Paradise: the boom in Sheffield’s parakeet population. One of the great privileges of commissioning stories from Sheffield freelancers is the chance to bring regular pieces by David Bocking to our ever-appreciative audience. So rooted in Sheffield is David (or “Bod”, as Jarvis Cocker used to call him in the 1980s — yes, really) that he sometimes seems to be hewn from the very landscape itself. As such, there is almost nothing he doesn't know about the Steel City. This includes, we found out in March this year, the strange story of how the city came to have a population of parrots. Do they really come from Mick Jagger’s aviary, as some people suggest?

Daniel Timms 

The Rise and Fall of the Dorothy Pax. Dan’s piece on the Dorothy Pax was a fitting tribute to one of the city’s most loved venues, which closed down this year. He managed to capture the love people have for the place, and how hard it was for owner Richard Henderson that his lifelong dream of running a venue had come to an end. There were some great pictures of Richard and the bands that played the Pax, and one of the most poignant endings on any of our pieces this year. “Just as I’m about to leave, a man walks into the Dorothy Pax with his dog. ‘Sorry, we’re closed,’ says Henderson. ‘Closed altogether?’ asks the man. Henderson sighs. ‘Yeah, closed altogether.’”

The Secret Bus Driver. Sometimes a story just really captures the imagination of our readers. The secret bus driver was that kind of story. Promising to explain “why your bus is always late” it went deep into how bus timetables actually work and the — often not easy — experience of being a bus driver. Stress, and customers who are sometimes abusive or jump in the door as it’s closing. “Bus drivers can’t read your thoughts, although some of you behave as though you think we can. And poking your arm out at the last minute and then shooting us an incredulous look doesn’t cut it, sorry.” Other highlights: “If your bank card declines it isn’t 'a problem with my machine' and you can’t 'just get on anyway', and using the emergency button on the outside of the bus will definitely get you thrown off. No questions asked.”

James Holmes has bought a truly massive Union Jack. Will he be able to hang it up? This piece (one of Mollie’s first for us) was on the one hand an utterly ludicrous story about a man looking to hang up a 100ft wide Union Jack on the side of a prominent building in Chesterfield, and on the other a quite profound look into the strong emotions prompted this summer by “Operation Raise the Colours”, that took place across England this summer. It was also a brilliant example of a journalist bravely confronting someone with their own words (despite being sat in their Land Rover Defender with them at the time). When Mollie asked why Holmes had shared a post saying “All mosques should be closed in the UK” he responded: “I don’t think I posted that. Did I? I did? I maybe did. I did. I maybe did a repost. Yeah, well, for you to bring that up, I think we can see the way you’re gonna want to slant this.”

Victoria Munro 

The last lockkeeper. I loved Dan’s profile of Dave Walker, one of the last remaining residential lockkeepers in the country. He’s been responsible for the stretch of canal from Victoria Quays to the River Don for almost 40 years but, when he does finally retire, the Canal and River Trust have made it clear they won’t be looking for a replacement, instead relying on a team of volunteers. It’s a fascinating look into an unusual way of life most people are likely unfamiliar with, and a testament to Dan’s talent as an interviewer and photographer.

The ‘harmful pseudo-science’ infecting Sheffield’s family courts. I was also hugely impressed — albeit pretty depressed — by this harrowing story from Jessica Bradley, who spoke to local mothers who had experienced a “harmful pseudo-science” being leveraged against them during custody battles. American child psychologist Richard Gardner coined “Parental Alienation Syndrome” in 1987, arguing that when a child is “preoccupied with deprecation and criticism” of one parent, it was a sign they had been “brainwashed” by the other — including in cases where a child alleged they had been sexually abused. Though Gardner’s theory has been widely discredited in the decades since, Jessica spoke to five mothers who say “parental alienation” was used against them in Sheffield’s family court, in order to argue their ex-partners should have access to children they allegedly abused. 

Rednote, rankings, and rumoured riches: The real lives of Sheffield’s Chinese Students. This piece from our intern Misty Lamb — who also wrote one of Mollie’s favourites below — is a great example of why we love working with a wide range of freelance writers and journalists, in addition to our full-time team. (If you have a story you’d like to pitch next year, please email your idea to editor@sheffieldtribune.co.uk.) Getting this kind of insight into the lives of the University of Sheffield’s Chinese international students would have been impossible for a writer that couldn’t speak Mandarin and Misty did a great job drawing the reader into their world. 

Mollie Simpson

A Sheffield company wants to buy your face for £40. Should you sell? This piece was a fascinating inside look at a company given almost £350,000 in government funding to set up shop in Sheffield, which offers willing participants £40 in return for the company taking an incredibly detailed photo of your face to turn into hyper-realistic digital models. The models are used for everything from providing skin tones for makeup developers to creating characters in video games. If you’re keen to see an unbelievably detailed photo of your own face and maybe even see yourself showing up in the next generation of video game characters, it might be for you. But should you sell your own face for £40? Before you decide, note that this piece also contains the alarming detail that company founder James Busby's stated policy of people’s images never being used to generate any sexually explicit content is not completely watertight. “If I say this, it’s gonna sound bad, but you cannot guarantee that with anything,” Busby admitted. Personally, I’ll be avoiding it.

After Partygate, Kate Josephs pledged to ‘restore trust’. Three years on, how’s it going? I was moved by this great profile of council chief executive Kate Josephs. We’ve all read the explosive Telegraph story that thrust Josephs into the spotlight, but this was my first time reading about how Josephs felt as an online mob rallied to the cause of destroying her for marking her final day as director-general of the very taskforce that designed lockdown laws by throwing a “boozy” leaving party. It’s always a difficult task to cover the city’s leading decision makers, but I thought Victoria did a great job of humanising Josephs while also – as every journalist should when writing about major figures – not letting her off the hook. 

Blue Wednesday: How Owls fans are coping with a club in crisis. What do you do when your football club is in such dire financial straits that employees haven't been paid on time for five out of the last seven months, leading to the club being placed under a transfer embargo and possibly having a points deduction imposed? Do you boycott: refusing to watch the team play to starve the club’s ownership of an income stream in the hopes of forcing the owner to exit, or do you remain loyal? Dan examined the difficult choices Sheffield Wednesday fans were making at the height of the club’s woes, and how these led to divisions in the fanbase, a loss of matchday rituals and, according to one pub landlady, a 50% reduction in matchday takings. 

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