Archive for January 2014

All Downhill From Here? Memories of Sheffield's Ski Village with Katie Young

By | Published Tuesday 7 January 2014

On October 30th, 2013 I went to talk to Katie Young. Katie began visiting Sheffield Ski Village very shortly after it opened in 1988. Growing up, she could see it from her house on Bradley Street in Crookes, and said its prominence could have been a reason behind her wanting to go there. But it was her school that helped her cross the River Don and venture up into Parkwood Springs to go skiing. She tried her hand at snowboarding too, but found it too hard, and her friend broke his thumb, so she stuck to skiing.

All this changed when she was on holiday and learnt to snowboard on real snow in Europe. When she came back, she started snowboarding at the Ski Village again, this time progressing very quickly. So quickly in fact that she entered a number of competitions around the country and won most of them. So it’s not surprising that she got cherry-picked for the UK Junior Snowboarding Team. With Sheffield having more runs than any other dry ski slope in the UK, national competition finals were often held here. It was when Katie was competing on her home turf that she was offered this unique opportunity. 

Katie Young at Sheffield Ski Village, circa 1996, courtesy of the Katie Young collection
 
Katie can remember the Ski Village when it was just ski runs and portacabins. Later on she got a job as a technician, getting a free lift pass and therefore unlimited use of the slope. She would go every day, getting a lift off her mum or catching the bus, until she learnt to drive and would drive there herself. She is still in touch with some of the friends she made during that time.


Sheffield Ski Village, circa 1996, courtesy of the Katie Young collection
 
These days however, if she wants to go snowboarding, she has to go further afield. In 2012, after a series of smaller fires, the Sheffield Ski Village was decisively burnt to the ground. She described a video she saw on Facebook, where some regulars made a ‘last descent’ of the slope following the fire. If you go there today it would be impossible to do this, as the matting has either been torn up or grown through with vegetation and the bottom of the slope is covered in debris and the charred remains of buildings.

Sheffield Ski Village today
 
Katie’s snowboarding career took her all over Europe, and she showed me some photographs of idyllic mountains, some skylarking in chalets during bad weather, and of course action shots of the Ski Village itself. Unfortunately however, whilst competing abroad, Katie launched off a kicker without enough speed to make the down ramp, landing on the flat and damaging her anterior cruciate ligament. She had an operation, and was kept on the team, but early on during her comeback she damaged it again and had to have another operation.
There seems to be an uncanny connection between her story and the story of the ski village. Both received decisive blows that took them out of the game without warning. Katie still snowboards now, but not at the level of when she was competing. Her life has opened up in new ways following her injury. There are stories from Parkwood residents about sledging down the estate streets (now covered over by the Ski Village development), and I’m sure people will sledge on those hills in years to come. And as for new directions, this is a hot topic when it comes to the Ski Village. Katie would like it to become an indoor slope like the one at Castleford. Other rumours abound. But something needs to be done with the site, as it has become one giant eyesore and a free-for-all fly-tipping site. Parkwood Springs has many changes approaching during the run up to the end of the ‘official’ tipping contract in 2018. Some, including the proactive Friends of Parkwood Springs group, are campaigning for it to become a country park. What would you like to see on the site?

Dan Woodcock at Sheffield Ski Village, circa 1996, courtesy of the Katie Young collection


Dan Woodcock at Sheffield Ski Village, circa 1996, courtesy of the Katie Young collection


Katie Young at Sheffield Ski Village, circa 1996, courtesy of the Katie Young collection

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Reflections on the Cuthbert Bank Artswalk

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Below dark grey skies the Cuthbert Bank Artswalk left the Upperthorpe Library, midmorning on November 2nd 2013. The walk began through Philadelphia Greenspace. In view of Parkwood Springs, artist Emilie Taylor led a visual reflection on the landscape using monoprint. Everyone had a go, placing their sheet of paper on the inked-up glass sheet, producing work in response to what they could see, and old photographs and maps. Some pieces were visual, some written, some hybrid.

The next stop was Cuthbert Bank, which we accessed off Penistone Road. The sky was still dark grey, but thankfully it hadn’t yet begun to rain. We spent twenty to thirty minutes in the trees below some of the old pigeon lofts. Here we invoked the people who used to fly from the lofts, and talked about how the landscape has changed over the years. There was a lot of note taking and sketching going on within the group, and some interesting discussion. All the while the noise of the cars rose up through the trees.
Our next stop was Cuthbert Bank Road, where you can look down onto Cuthbert Bank from above. Looking over the wall, we saw a fox disappear into the undergrowth. There was a sense of peace, perhaps something of what the site used to be like before the houses were demolished, and the road encroached much closer. Parkwood Springs was in full view across the valley, and the traffic noise was dampened by the trees. Years ago we would have been looking out over the roofs of terrace houses, the valley full of industry, noise and smoke. Flying the pigeons from the bank was a way for the landlocked to reach for the sky.
As the rain finally began to fall we neared the Pavilion, and were thankful for our luck with the weather. Once inside, Emilie led a wax relief exercise with the group. With this technique, the marks made on the paper are invisible at first. We all gathered round, with ten or so invisible pictures. Then, one at a time, we inked the pictures up and the images revealed themselves, and one by one we told our stories.

You can watch a video summary of the day below:

 
 

 
 
Fox
a gloss on lines by Medbh McGuckian
 
The Whole Gist of His Life
Down among the dumped mattresses, discarded paint cans, an old tea pot yellow as Autumn, among brambles, fruits tightening like freeze-dried moons, below the red brick wall of Cuthbert Bank Road, where people dump what’s left of their lives after nightfall: spent tissues, magazines sticky with rain, take-away cartons half full of sodden chips, a fridge on its side like a white coffin. Elders hang on to their last few leaves, Jew’s Ears forming at the angles of their branches, fleshy and incongruous as the cloned ear on the back of a mouse. Amongst this debris, the whole gist of his life.
 
The Burning Velvet of Encounters
This piece of land takes names and swallows them whole. Photographs are boarded up. People move on. Look at the valley in 1948, a tract of land wearing its own smudged smile, the slag heap where they picked coal during the war. The city built up in layers, bombed, starts over again. Ink the mirror, settle the paper, trace the horizon as it is today, peel off this smoky image, not rooftops, not the dry ski slope running like pumice down the hillside, not the bough of crab apples or the green metal bench, but his brindle coat touting his age, the way we glimpsed him, muzzle tallowed with chip grease and wanting more, so much greed in his guts he’d eat your children if you left the door open. He slips our glimpse, into the undergrowth, leaves us scavenging the space with our eyes, feeling the burning velvet of encounters.
 
A Little Blood-Like Drop into The Sea of Tomorrow
My Aunt lived here, moved out, went to the Kelvin. I’m a woman with time round my neck. They moved whole streets in together. It was somewhere that could be kept clean. Those flats took the land and used it up. You couldn’t stand in their shadow in case someone launched a TV. It’s what people do, live their lives, throw them away. Draw this story with a stub of wax, a household candle, the sort everyone kept under the kitchen sink in ’74. Press on hard. You won’t see the image, but it’ll be there, waiting for a sluice of watered down ink to wash and reveal: a girl in long white socks in the rain, the slink of a fox, coat fading towards winter, everything going to earth, a little blood-like drop into the sea of tomorrow.
 
Julie Mellor


 

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