YORKSHIRE doesn’t appear to be doing well on the hotel front at present.
Just when you can start counting cranes again on the skyline of the region’s cities – a sure sign of a confident economy – then a few high profile hotel developments have gone pear-shaped.
To be honest, you didn’t need to be Mystic Meg (for older readers, she’s like Doris Stokes with a Cleopatra hairdo; for younger readers, you’ll have heard of neither of them) to predict the demise of Skelwith Group’s flagship project in Yorkshire.
The group’s subsidiary company Skelwith Leisure, revealed last week that it had gone into provisional liquidation, blaming the costs of a legal dispute over the ownership of the land at Flaxby Golf Course, between Harrogate and Knaresborough.
Skelwith Leisure had been behind a trumpeted £100m country club and 300-bedroom 5-star hotel on the former farmland next to the A1.
Plenty of golfers joined the fledgling club, putting up with a clubhouse made up of a couple of cobbled together portable buildings, in the hope they had got in early as members before the project – which Skelwith boasted would be grand enough to attract the likes of David Beckham to fly in by helicopter – was started in earnest.
Mind you, if Posh and Becks did fancy a weekend in the country, it probably wouldn’t be beside the A1 in North Yorkshire.
Although Bob Schofield, who owns the nearby Harrogate Paintball Centre, would certainly have shown them a good time.
It turns out that Skelwith Leisure decided that the proposed plan, granted planning permission back in 2010, to create the jewel in Yorkshire’s tourism crown might not actually be profitable – despite selling 158 rooms to investors including former England cricket captain Michael Vaughn.
So they made a few changes.
And put in a planning application to build a new town on the land complete with 2,213 new homes, shops, a primary school, restaurants and a doctors’ surgery.
Perhaps not surprisingly that invoked the ire of the Armstrong farming family who had sold them the land in the first place for the hotel and golf resort.
Now the dispute is headed to the High Court.
Two days after the collapse of Skelwith Leisure, another firm Skelwith Leisure (Raithwaite), which owns and operates the luxury hotel Raithwaite Hall, between Sandsend and Whitby, was placed into the hands of administrators at KPMG.
That happened after a winding-up petition by HM Revenue & Customs.
The Flaxby hotel project always looked like a pie-in-the-sky plan, but what happens to Raithwaite Hall remains to be seen.
Meanwhile in Leeds, the big hotel project in the city looks to have stalled.
Back in March GB Group Holdings, behind a £32m hotel project between Leeds Civic Hall and Leeds Arena which would have been operated by Hilton, went into administration with the loss of 350 jobs.
The hotel remains half built with little activity on site, as far as I can see.
Given that the Leeds City Region Local Enterprise Partnership gave the developers a £4.8m taxpayer loan to help build the 206-bed hotel, they will be hoping that it gets finished.
The city has plenty of development currently underway and in the pipeline.
It can ill afford one to remain unfinished right on the doorstep of the city council and in plain sight of the thousands of people visiting the first direct arena.
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IN a PR stunt that was so flimsy it shouldn’t have gained any headlines, digital station Radio Yorkshire, owned by former Leeds United chairman Ken Bates (remember him), last week offered outgoing FIFA president Sepp Blatter a work placement.
The move came after Blatter, whose presidency has been mired with allegations of corruption, suggested that he is hoping for a career on the wireless when his term at football’s governing body comes to an end.
It prompted the offer from Radio Yorkshire’s director of broadcasting during his weekly interview with Ken Bates (that must keep the bleeper machine busy).
Apparently Ken Bates was all in favour of the move.
Radio Yorkshire’s staff must be quaking at the prospect of having two of football’s most controversial figures in the building.
But it would certainly provide something to listen to.
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THE recent blog about working mens’ clubs prompted a call from former Yorkshire lawyer Ian Shuttleworth, now an in-demand after-dinner speaker with a passion for playing the spoons under the monicker The Amazing Little Shutt.
Ian told me he’d recently been to the funeral of popular Leeds club comedian Billy Bean.
After the service, the gathered comics and entertainers swapped stories as they toasted Billy’s memory.
One remembered the time he was lined up to perform at a club in Doncaster after a rock band had been on.
The compere came out on stage, cleared his throat and said to the audience: “Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve now got some young lads from Manchester who are just starting out as a group so we’ve got them cheap. So give them a big hand please for Iock.
A long-haired guitarist leaned forward and whispered to the compere: “We’re actually called 10cc.”
Have a great weekend.