Video: Celebrating 20 years of Meadowhall

FOR a man about to to take a 100m gamble on the most ambitious shopping mall in Europe, Eddie Healey had an odd sense of priorities.

We were about a week away from opening the doors to Meadowhall, the north American shopping experience transplanted to an industrial wasteland north of Sheffield – and a million issues remained unresolved.

Would the builders be finished? Would the motorway roadworks be lifted? What about the new train station outside?

But Eddie's mind was on the finer detail. His opening shot at our morning conference was this: "Have you got Blue Velvet by Bobby Vinton?"

Eddie Healey was a successful and fabulously wealthy property developer, but his heart, it seemed to me, was in showbusiness.

Two years before, he had thrown a party at his home in Hull and booked Belinda Carlisle, Rowan Atkinson and Dave Lee Travis as the turns.

He had been to Canada to marvel at the huge malls there, and brought their creators back to Sheffield to design the template for Meadowhall.

And he had commissioned a video wall – the biggest money could buy – from Philips in Holland as the showpiece for his food court.

That's why I was there: seconded from Yorkshire TV to make programmes and procure music videos for this electronic edifice.

"My hobby's pop music," Eddie said, by way of explaining his Bobby Vinton fixation. Blue Velvet was an old Sixties tune enjoying a revival from exposure on a face cream advert. It was, said Eddie, what people would want to see on the video wall while glancing up from their burgers and chips.

"We need the top five singles every week on that screen," he

decreed. "And I Should Be So Lucky by Kylie Minogue." That was already a golden oldie, but you didn't argue with Eddie.

From a distance of 20 years, it's hard to imagine why the content of a video wall should have been anything more than a footnote on someone's Filofax, let alone the boss's pet project. But, though they hadn't invented the phrase yet, Eddie liked to micro-manage. And he did it with such natural charm that no-one seemed to mind at all.

Meadowhall, for all its rampant commercialism, was a rare attempt, largely by him, to fashion a retail environment in which shops and showbusiness could co-exist. It was a shame, but not a surprise, to see some of the early creativity sacrificed on the altar of selling.

An early casualty was the Ride of Life, a sort of mini theme park commissioned from the artist Tim Hunkin and others. Passengers would be transported by mechanical sofa through a Wallace and Gromit-esque world of dysfunctional domesticity. Apparently, the retailers didn't go for it and it was never installed.

Somewhat more successful was the Rock Island Diner, an American-style restaurant where the waitresses danced on tables to tunes from Grease.

And then there was the Meadowhall TV studio – a broadcast-standard installation with permanently wired camera points across the food court. The idea was to broadcast a Friday night show live from there.

Eddie Healey almost hadn't built a shopping centre in Sheffield at all. His plan had been to erect something called Retail World on the former Parkgate steelworks at Rotherham. Meadowhall, meanwhile, was a rival development dreamed up by another wealthy developer, Paul Sykes. It was only when the two men joined forces that the sprawl we now recognise as Meadowhall came to be.

The tenants themselves comprised the usual high street suspects: Marks and Spencer, Debenhams, C&A. Mobile phone shops, cappuccino bars and other Nineties inventions were on no-one's horizon. And nothing was open on Sundays.

Nevertheless, it drew the punters from the start. They queued for miles down the M1 to get in. They could hardly wait to throw their money into the tills. And that's when Meadowhall discovered that shopping was showbusiness. They didn't need the frills after all.

Eddie Healey sold it to British Land in 1999, but he had taken a back seat to the retailers long before, and our morning conferences descended into marketing clich. The new bosses had no time for video walls, with or without Bobby Vinton. Soon, the TV studio was dismantled and the space commandeered for something that would generate more cash per square foot. The waitresses hung up their dancing shoes. And the Ride of Life was taken in bits to an old mill in Hebden Bridge.

We never did broadcast from there on Friday nights. We thought it would be a crowd-puller, but in the end they didn't need one: the shops were the stars. That's showbusiness for you.