The Deep End

I’ve been an entrepreneur since I was about fourteen. It started with wooden scraps, offcuts really, from my parents’ factory floor, which I’d sell at country fairs up and down the country. By eighteen I’d graduated to designing my own board game for the launch of the Supertram in Sheffield. It failed miserably. The whole thing leaned on local retailers and businesses signing up as sponsors, and those businesses had been quietly decimated by the building of the tram route. But it taught me some great lessons, and it networked me across Sheffield. More than anything, it gave me the bug. I wanted to build a business of my own.

Around the same time I was working for Next, selling ladieswear, and pulling shifts in pubs in the evenings, first as a glass collector, then behind the bar. I did a stint working for my parents as a bookkeeper and draughtsperson, and it taught me a great deal (double-entry bookkeeping was a blast…). They ran a great business and worked incredibly hard, but working for them just wasn’t for me, and I craved doing something for myself.

Then, when I was twenty-two, I was having a game of tennis with a few friends and somebody mentioned that Hillsborough Baths, the old swimming pool, was up for sale, and that somebody ought to buy it and turn it into a pub. On my way home that evening I stopped, pulled over, and copied down the telephone number on the sign on the front of the building. It belonged to a pension fund in Birmingham. I rang them the moment I got home and asked how much the building was. £120,000 freehold.

I hadn’t gone to university. My parents had given me £3000, roughly the equivalent of what they’d given my brothers to go and study. A year earlier, at seventeen, I’d used money like it to buy a house (the condition of the gift), and I’d been renting out the rooms and living in the front room myself. That meant I could apply for a credit card, and I’d built up a decent credit limit. So I rang the pension fund back and asked what the deposit was. £6000. Then I rang the credit card company and asked what my limit was, and they very kindly put it up. And I bought the building.

Converting it was a hell of a task. I was lucky again in that my parents were designers, and they really helped me plan it out. I sat at a drawing board and drew up the floor plans myself, building up quite a lot of credit card debt in the process, but we got it through planning, after a massive fight.

I became a bit of a local figure. Not a celebrity, nothing like that. In fact quite a lot of people hated me, because they were convinced I was going to turn this magnificent building into a nightclub. And it was a magnificent building: designed before the First World War, built after it, and opened in 1926. Neoclassical. That’s what drew me to it in the first place. There was a televised community debate. There were newspaper articles. The local diocese, which sat directly behind the building, came out against me very firmly. But planning was granted.

Then came licensing, which was its own ordeal: two days in court. I had a scale model of the building made, and we brought a petition signed by 1200 people in support of the plans. And I still didn’t have the money to open. I needed £500k to pay off the rest of the freehold and carry out the refit, taking the place from a derelict shell to a live music venue: The Deep End.

My lucky break came when a room opened up in my house, the one I’d been renting out while living in the front room. A young man in his final year of a law degree in Sheffield came to look at it, shook my hand, and took the room. A couple of weeks later he moved in, and he was immediately drawn to the shrine I’d built in the front room: the scale model, the drawings, the whole project. So I took him down to see the building. I unlocked the padlock on the front door and showed him around.

Those who know me know I speak passionately, with a lot of energy, and thankfully, after all the years of things I’ve tried and failed, tried and scaled, tried and everything in between, that energy hasn’t diminished. The next day he rang his parents. His father flew over with a brother or two, and they agreed to guarantee a mortgage with the Bank of Ireland for the amount I needed, in exchange for 50% of the business and the building. I took the deal.

Seven or eight months later, on the fifth of November 1997, we opened. No soft launch, no dry run. We just got the place ready and opened the doors. I remember it well. Quite an experience.

While we were still building, at the insistence of Sheffield’s licensing officer, I’d taken on a couple of other jobs. One was a bar in Wombwell, near Barnsley, as assistant manager, a favour to a chap who’d called it in. That was an eye-opener. I worked there a couple of months and pretty much came home with blood on my shirt every shift, because the locals loved a fight on a Friday night, usually between members of the same family. I also took the lease on a pub called the Bellevue in Walkley, Sheffield, which had been shut after a particularly nasty fight. Enterprise charged me twenty pounds a week to reopen it, and I ran it for three or four months while The Deep End was being built.

So I’d work the nights, work the days, then head down to The Deep End to check on the builders, direct the build, and work with the architects, and with the Supertram, whose stop outside we had to lift by an inch to give ourselves a flat entry. Another story, another day, and an expensive exercise.

I ran The Deep End from 1997 until 2003.