‘They willingly took our money and sold us death traps’

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By Victoria Munro

If Jemima Staddon hadn’t worked a half-day on 10 November last year, she dreads to imagine the tragedy that might have struck Riverside House, a block of 10 flats near the Foundry climbing centre. Even with her there, what happened that afternoon kicked off a months-long battle over safety, one that eventually saw her and all of her neighbours forced to evacuate for over a week. It’s a dispute still ongoing to this day. 

But back in November, when she glimpsed something orange on the mezzanine out of the corner of her eye, she thought little of it. It was only when she looked closer that she spotted plastic melting down into her kitchen sink from above. Her home of four years was on fire.

By the time Jemima had banged on her neighbours’ doors and raced back in to rescue her two cats (both unharmed), she struggled to spot them through the smoke. “The flames were twice the height of me.” She would later learn the fire was a freak accident; an extension cable, which she bought from Wilkos and which wasn’t overloaded, had malfunctioned. 

But, while firefighters were poking around in her charred home, they spotted something concerning. There were sprinkler heads dotted all over her ceiling, why had none of them come on?

A spokesperson from South Yorkshire Fire & Rescue tells me it took seven fire engines, two hoses and almost an hour to get the blaze under control. I can imagine it was an awkward job. Riverside House is an L-shaped block wedged snugly between much larger buildings and backs onto the River Don; the front door is the only way in or out. Jemima worries what would have happened to the only other person home at the time — a university student with his headphones in for an online seminar — if she hadn’t been there to ring the fire brigade immediately and tell him to leave the building. By the time the fire was large enough to trigger the alarm in his flat, would he have been able to escape? 

“There is no sprinkler system for Riverside House,” reads an email from the block’s managing agent Barnsdales shortly after the fire, when Jemima asked about what the firefighters had pointed out. But there was, she replied, sending a photo to prove it. Barnsdales quickly corrected themselves. “The sprinkler system may remain from when the building operated as an industrial unit,” a later email reads, “but it is not operational and has not been in use since the building was converted in 2008.”

To be fair to Barnsdales, this is partly true. The sprinklers have not worked since the building was turned into flats in 2008. However, this is also the same year they were installed. According to a court document obtained by The Tribune, the Barnsley-based company that converted the building — Nu-Build Group — knew full well the sprinklers did not work. Despite this, the company that owns the freehold — Murdoch Investments Ltd, owned by the same directors — put the flats up for sale anyway. “Personally, I’m of the view that they willingly took our money and sold us death traps,” Jemima’s neighbour Peter Jones tells me. “It’s a good job Jemima was in at the time, otherwise the whole place could have gone up in flames.” 

Barnsdales did not respond to a detailed list of questions from The Tribune. Neither did Raymond and Andrew Murdoch, the father-son directors of both Nu-Build Group and Murdoch Investments Ltd. According to Peter and Jemima, this lack of communication comes as little surprise. “We’ve had silence from the Murdochs ever since this happened,” Peter says. 

In the intervening six months, the story of Riverside House has only grown stranger and stranger. In mid-April, South Yorkshire Fire & Rescue became so frustrated by the lack of action to keep residents’ safe that they reached for what Peter was told is their “nuclear option”: a prohibition notice. “We all came home one day to find signs plastered all over the entrance, saying the building has to be evacuated with immediate effect,” he says. “So basically we were just kicked out on the street.”

How were the problems at Riverside House allowed to happen? And, now they have been uncovered, why are they proving so hard to solve?