A rare interview with Eddie Healey, whose £120m plan for Odsal was exclusively revealed by the T&A this week. Jim Greenhalf reports.

There are two reasons why property developer Eddie Healey prefers to remain out of the limelight: he wants his family to have a normal life; and he distrusts the media's appetite for setting up people to knock them down.

But after nearly six years of false dawns associated with the Superdome, Mr Healey accepts that he has got to establish his bone fides with the public at large, and that simply listing his track record of developments in South Yorkshire and Germany is not enough.

Would-be entrepreneurs use publicity as a form of collateral to establish their credibility. Steady Eddie Healey works the other way round. In 1987 his Stadium group bought a majority stake in Meadowhall when businessman Paul Sykes couldn't get the scheme going. Three years later the gigantic shopping and leisure complex opened.

After that he fancied having a go at regenerating a former steelworks site in Germany's Ruhr Valley. It took him six years from start to finish (which partly explains why he did not submit a scheme for Odsal back in 1992 when Bradford Council asked for offers). Now CentreO projects itself as one of Europe's largest mixed-use developments, totalling more than 200,000 metres of leisure, shopping and business space.

It was in his office in Oberhausen in November last year that he and his son Paul contemplated Stadium's next enterprise.

"We had very good relationships with Sheffield and Rotherham. I said to Paul 'The one I would like to have a crack at is Bradford' which was having problems competing with the likes of Leeds and Meadowhall. Out of the blue I decided that Bradford ought to be interested in a developer like us," he said.

After an exchange of letters with City Hall he met council leader Councillor John Ryan - for whom he expressed the highest respect - chief executive Richard Penn plus other officers, and explained that the city needed a quality development. At first he spent some time with the council's inward investment manager Richard Willoughby looking at the city centre.

Willoughby happened to mention the council's relationship with the building company Bovis which, coincidentally, had built Meadowhall. Eddie Healey's Bovis contacts told him about the Superdome project which seemed to be going nowhere.

He saw the potential in the site, but was told that a formal deal with the council was out of the question because of the two-year extension granted to Superdome which wasn't due to expire until December 31, 1998. So he approached Superdome developer John Garside, and after various communications eventually offered him what he describes as a "twin-track" deal.

"I said if by October 1998 he wasn't able to get the scheme off the ground I could present my plan to the council. I offered him a six-figure sum of money up front and a share in the profits in my scheme. He refused.

"Then I thought I'd speak to Bradford Bulls chairman Chris Caisley. I said I'd like to do a deal with the Bulls if we could have his asset, the property licence at Odsal," he said.

Mr Healey's lawyers advised him that no development could take place on site at Odsal without the agreement of the sitting tenant. As Chris Caisley hadn't signed such an agreement with Superdome this left the door open for a deal with the Stadium group. A contract was signed on Monday week last. Chris Caisley maintains that this has in effect killed Superdome stone dead irrespective of the council's extension.

The purpose of relating all this is to demonstrate Eddie Healey's steady acumen. Having determined to have a crack at a Bradford development he has picked his way through a knotty situation with quiet methodicalness. Born in Hull in April 1937, Eddie Healey had a family DIY business called Status which he sold to MFI in 1980. He founded the Stadium group in 1982, choosing the name from the dictionary.

He tells one story against himself - "one of my failures." While building Meadowhall the Hillsborough Disaster occurred. Some of the building workers had been in the ground when 96 Liverpool fans died. Eddie Healey listened to their stories and had an idea.

"I told Liverpool Council I wanted to build a Mersey Stadium, an 80,000-seater ground for both Liverpool and Everton. The council offered me a 100-acre site.

"Then I went to Liverpool and Everton and offered them an £80m stadium, providing we could sell 7,000 executive seats at £1,000 for Liverpool and £500 for Everton. Both clubs refused."

In 1992, the Premier League began. What wouldn't both Merseyside clubs give now to have the biggest ground in the country?

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