- Will you be impacted by the developments on Kilvey Hill? Send an email to sophia.stanford@mailonline.co.uk
A ‘devastated’ Swansea community has said it would be an ‘injustice’ to build a £40million theme park – which boasts a zip-wire, gondola, sky-swing, luge and open top bar – on rustic Kilvey Hill.
Even though the development would cause ‘significant harm arising from landscape and visual impacts’ according to a council report, the plans were approved by Swansea Planning Committee.
The park, proposed by the New Zealand-based global tourism company Skyline Enterprises Ltd, has been backed by the Welsh Government, who have given £4million alongside Swansea’s Council’s contribution of £8.4million in an attempt to bring tourism into the area.
Jane Britton, who has lived on the hill that looks over the city for the last 20 years, has had to go to the doctor over her decimated mental health caused by the constant dread the park will be built.
‘It has taken over my life,’ the 62-year-old said before pausing, her eyes tearing up, ‘it all comes out now because people don’t realise the impact that it has, but it’s huge.’
‘I know I look okay right now because I wear a mask, but when everybody’s gone, my mental health is…’ she trailed off.
Ms Britton has lived on Kilvey Hill for the past 20 years, having kept horses there since she was a teenager and was one of thousands of children to plant a tree during the Swansea Valley Project on Kilvey Hill in 1972 because the land was black from the copper mines.
‘This hill is really special to so many people and we’ve watched it grow up. It was supposed to be my dream home and something that was precious has now been scratched and tarnished.’
Ms Britton’s niece Lucy said she felt ‘so desperate’ and could see how much the ‘thoughtless and inconsiderate’ proposal was affecting everyone else that she decided to reach out to Sir David Attenborough for help.
She told the wildlife presenter that the hill is ‘home to a diverse ecosystem teeming with wildlife’ and each part of the hill ‘works in harmony and encourages new growth and life to thrive’.
Building on it would be a ‘catastrophe’ and and even though ‘everyone is trying so much to save Kilvey Hill, our efforts seem futile’.
‘We feel incredibly helpless as we are fighting against giant corporations and councils,’ she added.
Sir Attenborough replied (‘we were all jumping around, screaming, it was crazy,’ Lucy laughed) with the advice to contact her local representatives.
Cllr Rob Stewart has insisted that the scheme will ‘provide a significant boost to our tourist offering’, supposedly contributing £84million to the local economy.
He said the development will bring over 300 jobs during construction and more than 100 during operation.
But local Ben Houghton dismissed these numbers, saying that the construction jobs are likely given to Kiwis shipped in to work on the project and the creation of ‘100 low-paying jobs in one of Wales’ poorest areas is meaningless’.
Wales has been plagued with a history of unsuccessful bids to improve tourism.
More than £1.6million was invested into a proposal for a leading martial arts centre in Llangollen in 2013 that never opened – Senedd’s Public Accounts Committee said this money was wasted by the government’s procedural failures.
A Bala heritage centre was closed three years after opening, despite £3.4million invested by the Welsh Government.
And a supposed world class race-track near Ebbw Vale never took off, with £7million funded by the Welsh Government that they will never get back from the Circuit of Wales project.
Cllr Joe Hale has condemned Swansea Council’s decision to give the plans the green light, saying it was ‘unforgivable to trade our clean environment for 30 pieces of silver’ and that the development ‘goes against everything that we should be doing as a council’.
‘We are handing our heritage over to foreign owners who can do what they want with our only green space on this side of Swansea,’ he added.
‘These people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.’
Mike Phippen, who lives just below where the development would be, believes the ‘white elephant’ would ‘spoil our way of life completely’.
‘Kilvey Hill is supposed to be a place for people’s well-being, where they can go and escape to and leave the stresses of daily life down below.’
The retired Royal Mail manager said his concerns were similarly ignored by the ‘biased’ council: ‘There’s been no communication at all, none whatsoever. I must have sent 10 letters of complaint to various departments but nothing – it’s dreadful.’
The 77-year-old further highlighted what he sees as the hypocrisy of the council after he was denied planning permission for a small outbuilding outback because it was considered a visual impact while his son’s dog-grooming business was limited by how many hounds he could house over noise concerns.
Kilvey Hill was registered by the Welsh Government as a ‘Quiet Area’, a legally protected zone that was installed to protect local residents’ ‘well being’ by offering respite to the bustling everyday life.
Although there was a noise study, the Skyline project was deemed suitable for the Quiet Area’s rule that insists ‘at least 75 per cent of Kilvey Hill must remain below 65dB to preserve its tranquillity’ (about as loud as the hum of a fridge).
Mr Houghton argued that it was ‘obvious’ the instalment of the activity rides would push noise levels above legal limits and Mr Phippen is convinced he would hear the screams from the zip-wire by his property.
‘They are just picking and choosing what they want,’ Mr Houghton said.
Mr Phippen said this development is ‘all about making money and bringing tourism but they haven’t thought of the infrastructure and the facilities that are here now, which need improving before that’.
He claimed that Cllr Rob Stewart implied ‘we’d deal with the problems that arise from the park afterwards’ but this was compared to a ‘horse bolting a stable door’.
‘We’ve already got a traffic problem and now they expect to take an extra 1500 cars? It’s ridiculous.’
His neighbour, Richard ‘Blod’ Williams was born on the hill and uses it to move across Swansea with his horses but believes this would come to an end if the park was built.
He rode his horses to a council surgery one day just to show them ‘I’m real, they’re real’ and how he would be impacted if the ‘concrete jungle’ was made.
‘We’ve been treated terribly,’ he sighed.
Ms Britton, who has a visual impairment, said the council ‘point blank refused’ to release paper copies of their documents at various points – ‘why should I have been left out at every stage of the way?’
When neighbours printed out copies for Ms Britton, they felt that the council was also trying to overwhelm them with documents by forcing them to read a 2,200 page document in under a week if they wanted to contribute to a local planning meeting.
Ms Britton said she was then cut off during her two minute presentation to the Planning Meeting and her camera moved away from her face on the broadcast link, which she believed was an attempt to silence her.
‘I was excluded from the neighbour consultation, I was excluded from the hydro-geological report, and I was excluded from the noise assessment. And when I stood up at the meeting and said all this to them and panned the camera away from me, it just felt like a slap in the face.’
The council also shared Ms Britton’s details in a publicly made document violating her data protection rights – even though she complained, she felt she ‘couldn’t trust the process anymore’. She said Swansea Council apologised to her for the administrative error.
‘This was the straw that broke the camel’s back – I just knew I couldn’t rely on them anymore.’
Ms Britton’s sister, Clare Hughes, added that ‘the sheer frustration of it is overwhelming because they just wont talk, why won’t they just be transparent?’
‘Why won’t you just be upfront about it? Why aren’t you including us?’
Ms Britton said: ‘I don’t think I’ve been treated personally with respect. I don’t think the community has been treated with respect.’
But Swansea Council have insisted that ‘all material planning considerations were taken into account when determining the application’.
They added: ‘As the developer, the planning application and supporting information were provided by Skyline.
‘The council acted properly in its due diligence and consideration of the information provided.’
The Welsh Government confirmed that a call-in request was made too late for a review to be made by the government.
‘Responsibility for the grant of consent, and the reasoning for it, rests with the Council’ and the decision can only be challenged in court, they said.
The Welsh Government added ‘if anyone considers there were procedural mistakes made by Swansea Council, they can seek to challenge the decision through the courts’.
One local who made unfounded claims that the councillors were accepting ‘brown paper bags’ online was said to have been contacted about their ‘defamatory’ statements and was ‘threatened’.
Another ‘well-respected member of the community’ has said she has been similarly ‘bullied and intimidated’ after raising her concerns.
The 545 complaints lodged with the council over the park have since been removed from the planning documents website, in an ‘unprecedented and deeply concerning move’.
‘The deliberate obstruction of access to public objections raises the question, what is Swansea Council trying to hide?’ one environmental campaign group asked.
Cllr Stewart’s further claims that the ‘fantastic’ adventure park attraction would ‘improve biodiversity and ecology’ was also met with ridicule by locals.
Swansea Friends of the Earth (SFE) strongly condemned Swansea Council for its ‘blatant lack of fairness and transparency in determining the planning application’.
They accused the council of ‘failing to act with impartiality, disregarding due process and failing to uphold the Nolan Principles of Public Life, which demand integrity, accountability, and openness in decision-making’.
They believe the council had already made their decision – made ‘evident’ by their decision to help fund Skyline’s development – and only listened to residents as a ‘formality’.
‘Public voices simply do not matter’ to the council, they added.
Neil Jones, from SFE said ‘the council has been allowed to mark its own homework on a project that they supported from the beginning’.
‘Then, in some cases, it seems they have actually claimed that the dog has eaten it anyway. This undermines faith in the fairness of the whole process.’
Swansea Council also failed to do proper, detailed ecological surveys and ignored concerns that Kilvey Hill was home to Wales’s rarest and most endangered butterfly, High Brown Fritillary, SFE claimed.
The species is protected under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 and the lack of an investigation would be ‘grossly negligent’.
The Environment Centre similarly believed that ‘it is massively important to keep and preserve these green and natural spaces in the east side of Swansea’.
Mr Phippen shared that Kilvey Hill is home to ‘wonderful nature and wildlife that live on the hill like red kites, a family of buzzards, kestrels, jays, and nuthatches that nest here every summer who migrate all the way from Africa’.
‘They’re special and fly 3,000 miles to nest here, if we destroy the hill I’m worried they won’t come back.’
‘It would be an act of vandalism to build here,’ Ms Britton added, echoing the sentiments a mum of two autistic children.
Her family use the green space as a sanctuary – losing it would be ‘devastating’.
Paul Sweeney, 43, has been coming up the hill for years and was ‘really, really, really angry’ about the plans.
The scaffolder from Bon-y-maen felt the money was misplaced as people ‘won’t come back to the park once they tried it once’ and ‘should have been invested into improving the city itself’.
Andrew Martin, 43, responded that people visit Kilvey Hill ‘for the birds, for the nature and the peace and quiet – we don’t need a big bar up here.’
Cameron Parker said it was ‘s**t’ that the park would be built on Kilvey Hill and was frustrated there wasn’t more awareness made about the extent of the plans.
‘I’ve just come up here to sit and look at the view in silence after a busy day and now I might not be able to do that anymore,’ the 21-year-old said.
‘You’re taking an important place away from a community by London-ifying it – it’s completely capitalistic and we don’t want that here.’
Chris Lewis, 70, who had extensive experience working with banks, believed that there was ‘far from a strong business case for this thing’.
He added that since it was first announced in 2017, the pandemic and cost of living crisis has changed the world we live in and the need for a park like this.
‘Wales is a relatively poor area – when people come to Swansea to see the bays they often bring their own food. No one will spend the amount of money needed to go up the hill.’
‘This is a socially deprived area, people can’t afford to go places these days, but this is where they play because it’s free,’ Ms Britton added.
Skyline have been contacted for comment but have previously said the project would cover ‘approximately 10% of Kilvey Hill and allow free, unhindered access to continue while making the hill more accessible’.
Danny Luke, from Skyline Enterprises, has also said: ‘Extensive environmental assessments have been carried out with our South Wales-based partners, the environmental dimension partnership, in collaboration with Natural Resources Wales to ensure the site would be sustainably developed, contributing to greater biodiversity at the site.’
The tourism company has come under fire in its own country over a casino they own allegedly failed to comply with the the Anti-Money Laundering and Countering Financing of Terrorism Act over a five-year period.
Skyline said in December they were working to ‘resolve these matters as quickly as possible’.
And one of their restaurant facility’s in Queenstown caused a landslide that forced 41 people to evacuate their homes after heavy rains caused rocks and shingle to tumble down the hill.
Skyline said they were ‘dismayed and very sorry’ and was working with the developer to fix the problem in 2023.
