Sheffield: a Post Industrial City ?

Sheffield is a great city. It occupies 7 hills apparently (just like Rome) and lots of valleys in between. It stretches out towards the Peak District National Park and adjoins Rotherham (the town where I was born...)

Head first to Dave Milner at his CITY SNAPPER site HERE, who has a rather fabulous set of images of the city which dates back years, and has some rather tremendous stuff on there. It's all very nicely indexed too....

Also found a rather splendid set of images produced by Karl McAuley HERE. There are plenty of LARGE sets from in and around the city. This is a great site for all Sheffield geography teachers.

SLIDE NUMBER	LOCATION
1	Church Street, CBD
2	Parkway
3	West St.
4	Burgess St and the Yorkshireman pub
5	Banner Cross
6	Sheffield University
7	Broomhill
8	Wards Brewery buildings
9	Lodge Moor
10	Stanage
11	Leopold St.
12	Meadowhall: Marks and Spencers
13	Pond Street Bus Station
14	Fulwood
15	Abbeydale Road
16	On a bus....
17	Handsworth
18	National Centre for Popular Music (closed) - now a University student union
19	Broomhill
20	Snake Pass
21	City Hall

'Had a very long and exhausting day … being shown every quarter of Sheffield on foot and by tram. I have now traversed almost the whole city. It seems to me, by daylight, one of the most appalling places I have ever seen. In whichever direction you look you see the same landscape of monstrous chimneys pouring forth smoke which is sometimes black and sometimes of a rosy tint said to be due to sulphur. You can smell the sulphur in the air all the while. All buildings are blackened within a year or two of being put up. Halting at one place I counted the factory chimneys I could see and there were 33. But is was very misty as well as smoky - there would have been many more visible on a clear day. I doubt whether there are any architecturally decent buildings in the town. The town is very hilly (said to be built on seven hills, like Rome) and everywhere streets of mean little houses blackened by smoke run up at sharp angles, paved with cobbles which are purposely set unevenly to give horses etc, a grip. At night the hilliness creates fine effects because you look across from one hillside to the other and see the lamps twinkling like stars. Huge jets of flame shoot periodically out of the roofs of the foundries (many working night shifts at present) and show a splendid rosy colour through the smoke and steam. When you get a glimpse inside you see enormous fiery serpents of red-hot and white-hot (really lemon coloured) iron being rolled out into rails. In the central slummy part of the town are the small workshops of the 'little bosses', i.e. smaller employers who are making chiefly cutlery. I don't think I ever in my life saw so many broken windows. Some of these workshops have hardly a pane of glass in their windows and you would not believe they were inhabitable if you did not see the employees, mostly girls, at work inside.

The town is being torn down and rebuilt at an immense speed. Everywhere among the slums are gaps with squalid mounds of bricks where condemned houses have been demolished and on all the outskirts of the town new estates of Corporation houses are going up. These are much inferior, at any rate in appearance, to those at Liverpool. They are in terribly bleak situations, too. One estate just behind where I am living now, at the very summit of a hill, on horrible sticky clay soil and swept by icy winds. Notice that the people going into these new houses from the slums will always be paying higher rents; and also will have to spend much more on fuel to keep themselves warm. Also, in many cases, will be further from their work and therefore spend more on conveyances. '