Leah’s Yard, so long unrecognised except by historians and industrial archaeologists, is at last established as the jewel in the crown of Sheffield’s game-changing Heart of the City development.
In an astute comment to an article in the Sheffield Tribune in October 2023, Robin Hughes pointed out that the prehistory of Heart of the City goes back to the 1960s when Sheffield City Council decided not to demolish much of the city centre to accommodate a ring road inside the inner ring road and awarded the flagship retail site on Cambridge Street to what was then Cole Brothers.
Subsequent development schemes came and went, yet the beauty of Heart of the City, led by the Director of City Centre Development, Nalin Seneviratne from 2017, is its piecemeal but coherent configuration, which has respected many though not all the surviving heritage buildings.
Most people who think about it would describe Leah’s Yard as a set of “little mesters” workshops, where the myriad small craftsmen worked together in close co-operation at their highly specialised metal trades for which Sheffield has been celebrated for centuries.
In fact, in its early days Leah’s Yard belonged to single occupants, initially a toolmaker, George Linley, who occupied the site in either 1817 or 1825. By 1842 it had become John Morton’s Coalpit Lane Horn Works, making handles for cutlery and knives.
(The coal pit was an outcrop where Furnival Gate now runs. Coalpit Lane was renamed when the Duke of Cambridge laid the foundation stone of the Crimea Monument at the top of The Moor in 1857.)
The works remained a horn manufactory until a die-stamper, Henry Leah, took over in 1891.
The Leahs found they had more room than they needed for their business and let space to up to eighteen different tradesmen at one time. By the beginning of the twentieth century Leah’s Yard was indeed a little mesters’ workplace.
Henry Leah’s son, grandson and great-grandson successively ran the place until 1976 when their business was amalgamated with Spear & Jackson.
The site was listed Grade II* in 1983 for its rarity and completeness. This presented difficulties for development planners and arguably ensured that the heritage buildings around Cambridge Street should be incorporated in the new build.
Leah’s Yard had no future as a museum piece, and the patina of grime and grit has had to go. I’m told that the restoration had more latitude than would have been possible in a historically accurate recreation.
Scrubbed up but outwardly intact, managed by local entrepreneurs James O’Hara and Tom Wolfenden, Leah’s Yard is already proving a magnet for high-end retailers and small businesses: the digital news outlet Tribune has relocated to the Yard, as has the podcast creator Persephonica.
Leah’s Yard preserves a precious though not unique piece of Sheffield’s heritage, echoing the diversity of the industrial past.
Its significance deserves light-touch interpretative displays so that visitors can discover the meaning of the place.
Meanwhile, the planners’ next dilemma sits across the road, where the former Cole Brothers store is waiting for a fresh purpose.