Eddie Healey
Tycoon who built Sheffield’s Meadowfield shopping centre
EDDIE HEALEY, who has died aged 83, became one of Yorkshire’s wealthiest businessmen as the developer of Sheffield’s Meadowhall shopping centre.
Having first made money from the sale of his family’s Hull-based chain of DIY stores, Healey embarked in the mid-1980s on an ambitious retail park development at Rotherham, but was frustrated when Marks & Spencer pulled out as an anchor tenant.
Meanwhile, Paul Sykes – a Barnsley miner’s son and former tyre-fitter – had conceived a similar vision to develop a former steelworks site beside the M1 at Sheffield, but was struggling to raise capital.
The two schemes a few miles apart were blighting each other’s prospects, but a phone call from Healey to Sykes led to a meeting of minds and a pooling of resources. Healey’s Stadium Developments company became the majority shareholder in Meadowhall, where construction began in 1988; opened two years later with 270 shops and vast car parking space on 125 acres, the complex attracted almost 20 million visitors in its first year.
Together with the Metro Centre at Gateshead and the later Trafford Centre in Manchester, Meadowhall became one of the north of England’s landmark destinations for consumers and a major contributor to the regional economy. After it was sold to British Land in 1999, Sykes became better known as a funder of Ukip while Healey banked a profit of £420 million for his share and remained president of the Meadowhall company.
Edwin Dyson Healey was born in Hull on April 23 1938, the second of three sons of Stanley Healey and his wife Sarah, née Sleight. Stanley – whose father and grandfather were housepainters – opened a corner shop selling painting and decorating supplies, where Eddie started work on leaving school at 16 with minimal qualifications.
His elder brother John led the growth of the family business into a DIY chain called Status Discount, which floated on the stock exchange in 1972 and grew to 40 stores, latterly with Eddie as chairman and their younger brother Malcolm as managing director.
After Status was sold to the discount furniture group MFI for £30 million in 1980, the brothers went their separate ways. John retired to Portugal; Malcolm built a series of successful kitchen businesses in the UK and US and became the owner of the grand Warter Priory estate in East Yorkshire; and Eddie moved into property, building warehouses for major retailers before embarking on his Rotherham and Sheffield ventures.
In later years he developed Germany’s largest shopping mall at Oberhausen on the Ruhr and another retail park at Llanelli in Wales. He also invested in Blue Power, a wind and solar power business run by his son Mark.
Eddie and Malcolm between them amassed a fortune estimated earlier this year at £2.2 billion. Small and dapper, Eddie Healey preferred to stay out of the limelight and rarely spoke to the media, but gave quietly to charitable causes and Conservative coffers. He also occasionally threw lavish parties, including hiring the pop group Girls Aloud to perform to 300 guests for his 70th birthday at London’s Dorchester Hotel.
In December 1995, two days after he had hosted his wife Carol’s 50th celebration at Carlton Towers, the Duke of Norfolk’s Yorkshire stately home, a masked gang broke into the family’s gated mansion at Kirk Ella near Hull, bound and gagged Eddie, Carol and their sons James and Mark, and got away with cash and jewellery valued at £250,000.
The Healeys’ aversion to publicity was intensified in 2005 when Eddie’s niece Suzy, Malcolm’s daughter, was strangled to death by a former boyfriend.
Eddie married Carol Lowrey in 1966; she survives him with their four sons and a daughter.
Eddie Healey, born April 23 1938, died August 21 2021