Graves Park: Manager of closed popular Rose Garden Cafe frustrated by lack of council action on replacement

Julie Collins has been the manager of the Rose Garden Cafe in Graves Park for eight years. The cafe is run on behalf of Sheffield City Council by city catering company Brewkitchen.

The cafe was suddenly closed in July when council officers took action after seeing a structural survey that expressed concerns over the stability of the building.

Reports on the 1927 building, which can be seen online at www.sheffield.gov.uk/parks-sport-recreation/rose-garden-cafe-closure, said the roof was “non-operational or about to fail”. There were also concerns over the front wall, which has moved.

Julie said: “We’ve been tenants for 14 years. We’ve been good tenants, never caused the council any problems.

“From our point of view, we feel we’ve been very poorly treated. At the moment there’s no timescales, no action.

‘We want to serve the community’

“The council say they’re working with us. We had a conversation every week and we’re not progressing at all.

“Whatever working with us means, we’d like to know. When they first closed the cafe we had a meeting the following day. Everything was very proactive on the council’s side.

“They were looking to put an immediate coffee cart in. Then it was a cube mobile catering unit they said they could put in over the six weeks holiday.

“They were looking at a longer-term facility. It’s a park and winter is approaching. We want to serve the community and we want to keep our 12 employees in employment.”

Julie and campaigners took part in a meeting last week with council leader Councillor Terry Fox, which she described as “quite positive. We fired a lot of questions at him”.

She said that a temporary structure needs to be put up straight away. She favours shipping containers like those which have been put up in Fargate.

She also wants to see some urgency and transparency from the council.

‘We just need some action’

“We told them all about the situation with 12 members of staff. It’s not just a problem because they like coming to work, they need a job.

“We’ve got a chef who’s just taken out a new mortgage who has four children to support. It’s devastating for us all.”

Julie said that at the moment all the team are on the payroll but that can’t last forever. They also want to stay together.

She added: “The amount of support from the community has been overwhelming – builders wanting to go and look at it. We’ve had emails from people to give us the equipment at cost.

“We’ve had a lot of support from the community, we just need some action and we can pull on this support.”

Julie spent last weekend petitioning visitors to Graves Park and Norfolk Park with members of the Save the Rose Garden Cafe campaign. They need more than 5,000 signatures from Sheffield residents to spark a debate on the issue at the city council.

She said they got lots of people signing up.

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