The current operators of The Leadmill in Sheffield have started their appeal against last month’s eviction order, which cleared the way for landlord The Electric Group to take over running the venue.
Back in 2022, the building’s owner – which runs existing venues in London, Bristol and Newcastle – gave the current Leadmill team, led by Phil Mills, twelve months to vacate the premises. Since then, it has stressed that it intends to run the venue in a pretty similar way to the current team
While that commitment was intended to allay fears that Sheffield would lose a venue that plays a crucial role in its live music ecosystem, it’s now being used by Mills as a key justification for why the court of appeal should review his case. He basically argues that the landlord is planning on unfairly capitalising on the good reputation he has built while running the venue.
According to the BBC, Mill’s team says that their eviction appeal is “an important test case affecting every business tenant in the country”. They add, “we say that it is wrong to be forced out of business by a no-fault eviction, while the landlord profits from the tenant’s hard work in building up a valuable business over many years”.
Mills and his team had previously called on the UK government to change the law and suspend Section 25 of the Landlord And Tenant Act – which governs both commercial and residential leases – saying that the law could be “exploited by landlords, allowing them to expropriate the investment the tenant has made into the premises, including any goodwill developed over many years”.
A petition organised by the venue in favour of that move received 45,054 signatures, but – not unsurprisingly – the government declined to make radical changes to property law, saying that it would not be a “proportionate way of addressing the underlying issues with the legislation”.
Mills has been running a multi-layered legal and PR campaign in a bid to avoid eviction. The PR aspects of the campaign have been pretty successful, the legal side less so. After a judge sided with The Electric Group in the formal eviction proceedings, Mills said he was still “committed to exhausting every possible legal avenue” before vacating the building.
The deadline for beginning the appeals process was 12 Mar. According to the UK courts database, papers have been filed for “permission to appeal and stay of execution”, and these were passed to the case management team on the day of the deadline. A request for further documents was then sent to Mills’ legal team on 17 Mar.
A spokesperson for the court of appeal told the BBC, “we are processing the application and awaiting documents before it can be referred to a judge to consider the application”. Court guidance explains that permission to appeal will only be granted if the claim “has a real prospect of succeeding or there is some other compelling reason for the appeal to be heard”.
Last month’s judgement gave Mills three months to vacate the premises after the 12 Mar appeal deadline. However, if the court accepts the appeal, that deadline will be paused.
If the appeal is rejected, The Electric Group will presumably start finalising its plans for taking over the venue. We know that will involve a change of name, because Mills’ company owns the Leadmill trademark. We don’t yet know what name The Electric Group will go for, although it did register the trademark Electric Sheffield in 2022.
The Sheffield Star this week spotted that the landlord got planning permission earlier this year to change a logo that is painted on the side of the building. Though they plan to simply replace the word Leadmill with Sheffield.