The concept of a ski slope in Rawtenstall seems almost ridiculous. For over fifty years, a strip of bristled plastic has clung to the side of a hill in this part of Lancashire, allowing children wearing borrowed helmets to slide into something that resembles a sporting life, despite the fact that the Pennines roll rather than soar. The response to the announcement in late April that the Rossendale Borough Council was thinking of closing The Hill Ski Centre was not limited to skiing. With locations like this, it is rarely the case.
The slope was described as “constrained” and “costly” in the council’s report, which was courteous and bureaucratic as these documents are. A £39,000 inter-company loan linked to the site, a £470,000 Sport England grant with clawback provisions that would make any closure legally awkward, and a nursery slope already maxed out between learners and rubber-ring tubers were among the figures it presented, which were modest by national standards but loud in local terms. To put it another way, the math doesn’t really work. It most likely hasn’t in a very long time.
The potential closure was deemed “short-sighted” by Dave Ryding, who became the first British alpine World Cup gold medallist after learning to ski on a plastic slope in nearby Pendle. Of course, he is correct, but it’s the kind of correctness that doesn’t cover operating expenses. There is a somewhat unpleasant contrast when he talks about Rossendale from the Olympic circuit, where he had just completed his slalom run in Bormio. One leisure review at a time, the system that created him is being discreetly audited out of existence.
The reprieve then arrived on May 7. The Hill was spared and included in what trade journals called a more comprehensive reorganization of Rossendale’s recreational holdings. Naturally, relief locally. However, anyone who has observed these tales unfold over the previous fifteen years is aware of the pattern. When the council needed to cut costs, the slope itself closed once before, in 2011. It reopened. During the pandemic, it closed once more. It reopened. Every time, they become a little more vulnerable and reliant on the kindness of a trust managing an aging estate.
That’s what the headlines usually overlook. In actuality, The Hill is not a tale about a single ski slope. It tells the tale of a specific type of British institution that was established in the hopeful civic era of the 1970s and is no longer compatible with the spreadsheet logic of contemporary local government. Small theaters powered by volunteer rotas, museums above the high street, dry slopes on hillsides, and swimming pools in market towns all exist within the same precarious arithmetic. expensive. My dear. When the line items are read aloud in a council chamber, it is challenging to defend.
Speaking with those who frequent these locations gives me the impression that the value lies somewhere that the accounts are unable to fully capture. The first time a child skis. An adolescent discovers a group of snowboarders. On a soggy Tuesday in Rawtenstall, an elderly skier who never reached the Alps discovered something reasonably close. All of this doesn’t bring in much money. It all creates the circumstances that lead to the eventual appearance of someone like Ryding.
It’s difficult to ignore how frequently the argument for closure sounds rational and the argument for remaining open sounds sentimental, and how infrequently that comparison is accurate. The goal of civic infrastructure is not to make money. Roads don’t. Libraries don’t. However, leisure assets continue to be evaluated using a criterion that the rest of public life is subtly exempt from.
This time, the Hill makes it through. Depending on how the next round of recommendations goes, the Whitaker Museum and the Ashworth Center might not be as fortunate. And somewhere in the countryside, on a hill or on a busy street, another famous little location is being described in a report that employs the word “constrained” without fully understanding what it means.
