At the start of the new podcast 900 Degrees, host Mobeen Azhar issues a stark warning that “this story goes to some hellish places”. Listeners accustomed to such preambles will no doubt shrug and plough on, but the warning is warranted. Listening to the first episode, which describes in painstaking detail the fire that broke out on May 11 1985 at Bradford City’s Valley Parade football ground, killing 56 people and injuring hundreds more, I had to pause a few times and take a breath.
Azhar, whose last podcast, Hometown: A Killing, investigated the heroin trade in Huddersfield, talks to those who were there, among them football fans, reporters and police who, five minutes before the end of the first half, recall seeing small wisps of smoke coming up through the main stand. Some mistook it for smoke bombs, which weren’t unusual at matches, but then they started to see flames.
The present-day testimony is interspersed with archive audio of Tony Delahunty, a commentator from Bradford’s Pennine Radio, reporting from the match. His panic and fear are palpable as, shortly before going off air, he shouts: “People are spilling on to the pitch and we can see the flames going up into the air there . . . Take your time, don’t rush, don’t push. Watch out for the kiddies.”
All the eyewitnesses share their shock at the speed at which the fire took hold. One notes how astonishing it was “to see something you’ve sat in every other week disappear in four minutes”. The 900 degrees of the podcast’s title refers to the estimated temperature of the stand in the midst of the blaze.
The series goes on to document the inquiry that followed, which lasted just five days and concluded that the fire was started by a discarded cigarette. Beneath the stands, which were old and due to be demolished a few days after the fire, litter had piled up and remained uncleared, despite warnings that it represented a fire hazard. Azhar meets Martin Fletcher, who was 12 in 1985, and was at the match with his younger brother, father, uncle and grandfather. All died in the fire, save for Fletcher who can’t remember how he escaped but who was almost certainly saved by his baseball cap, which stopped him from being burnt by the falling bitumen and bits of masonry.
Fletcher remains convinced the fire wasn’t an accident, and it’s these claims, related to Bradford City’s late chair Stafford Heginbotham (the Bradford fire was one of several blazes at businesses owned by him), that form the centrepiece of this series. If I have one complaint it is that Azhar takes too long getting to this. He sows the seeds of doubt early on, hinting at foul play, but chooses not to elaborate until the fourth and latest episode. Nonetheless, 900 Degrees tells a remarkable story of a shattering and seemingly avoidable tragedy.
