Category Archives: Sheffield’s Heritage

Steel workers’ resting place 1

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Anglican Chapel, Burngreave Cemetery, Sheffield

Anglican Chapel, Burngreave Cemetery, Sheffield

The great company cemeteries of the early Victorian period attract a great deal of attention, but the major push to bring decent burial to Britain’s industrial towns and cities followed the Burial Acts of 1852-7, which recognised that most people couldn’t afford the fees of the cemeteries companies, and empowered local authorities to provide dignified burial facilities for all.

In most towns this led to the establishment of an elective Burial Board, backed by the power to levy rates and led by local figures who knew, and felt a responsibility to, their local community.

This meant that overcrowded, insanitary churchyards could be closed.  It also enabled Roman Catholics and Nonconformists to be interred by their own clergy, rather than by the local Church of England priest.

I recently visited my local Victorian municipal burial ground, Burngreave Cemetery, Sheffield, which has a small but active Friends’ group:  http://www.friendsofburngreavecemetery.btck.co.uk.

The cemetery was opened in 1861, and extended by Sheffield Corporation when they took over from the Burial Board in 1900.  It’s still open for burials in existing graves, and the magnificent chapels by Flockton & Son are intact and listed, but in urgent need of weather-proofing and restoration.

In more prosperous times a company called Creative Outpost devised a grandiose restoration scheme but it seems to have closed down:  http://www.facebook.com/pages/Creative-outpost-sheffield-located-at-Burngreave-chapels/166750873081.

This leaves the Friends seeking fresh support, expertise and – most of all – funds.  They’ve digitised the cemetery records to provide an invaluable service locating graves for relatives and descendants, and they’ve begun a detailed study of some of their more celebrated “residents”:  http://www.friendsofburngreavecemetery.btck.co.uk/Residents.

They open the chapels as often as possible on Sunday mornings, and they serve as a link between the local community and the council’s Bereavement Services department.

Their existence is the vital factor that keeps Burngreave Cemetery safe and civilised, and encourages its use as a place to walk, jog and enjoy the fresh air in a built-up area that is not blessed with many amenities.

Every cemetery deserves friends like the Friends of Burngreave Cemetery.  The co-ordinating body for such organisations is the National Federation of Cemetery Friends:  http://cemeteryfriends.org.uk.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Victorian Cemeteries, please click here.

Steel barons’ Valhalla

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Nonconformist Chapel, General Cemetery, Sheffield (1976)

Nonconformist Chapel, General Cemetery, Sheffield (1976)

When I first knew the Sheffield General Cemetery in the late 1960s it was an undignified, sometimes frightening eyesore.

It was hard to believe that when it was opened in 1836 the Porter Valley was Sheffield’s classical Elysium.  On the north side of the valley stood the classical terrace The Mount (William Flockton c1830-2), the Botanical Gardens (Benjamin Broomhead Taylor & Robert Marnock 1833-6) and the Palladian Wesley College (William Flockton 1837-40, now King Edward VII School).

Opposite, the General Cemetery was laid out in terraces by the designer and curator of the Sheffield Botanical Gardens, Robert Marnock, with Greek Revival buildings, the Lion Gate, the Nonconformist chapel and the Secretary’s House, all designed by Samuel Worth, the designer, with B B Taylor, of Sheffield’s Cutler’s Hall (1832).

The original nine acres were extended by a further eight in 1850 to provide a consecrated section, dominated by William Flockton’s fine Gothic Cemetery Church.

The valley became built up in the later nineteenth century.  The turnpike road became a tram-route and Cemetery Avenue, originally built across open fields, is now one of the very few streets of terraced houses in the city with trees on either side [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sheffield_General_Cemetery_1830s.jpg].

The Cemetery is now recognised as one of the finest provincial company cemeteries in England, built in response to the 1832 cholera epidemic (which in Sheffield killed 404 people, including the Master Cutler), founded as a joint-stock company by Nonconformists, with picturesque landscaping and a fondness for Egyptian detail on otherwise classical buildings.

It is the resting place of many of the great names of Victorian Sheffield – Samuel Holberry (1816-1842), the Chartist leader;  James Montgomery (1771–1854), newspaper editor and hymn-writer – now reburied at Sheffield Cathedral;  Mark Firth (1819-1880), steel magnate and philanthropist and the brothers John, Thomas, and Skelton Cole, founders of the Sheffield department store.

Like almost all early-Victorian company cemeteries it fell into ruin as the income streams of plot-sales and burial fees dried up after the Second World War.

A development company bought the cemetery company, but gave up on the idea of building apartments on the site when they realised they’d have to exhume 87,000 corpses.

Eventually, in 1978, Sheffield City Council took it over, secured an Act of Parliament to extinguish burial rights, and perhaps ill-advisedly cleared eight hundred gravestones to create a green recreational space.

In 1989 a Friends’ group, now reconstituted as the Sheffield General Cemetery Trust [http://www.gencem.org/index.php], took on a voluntary role as custodians of the place, encouraging conservation, preservation and appropriate use of a fine amenity that at one time seemed an insoluble liability.

There is still much for the Trust and the City Council to do:  the Lion Gate and the Dissenters’ Chapel have been fully restored, but the Cemetery Church is an empty shell awaiting a creative and sympathetic use.

In the meantime, the Trust works constantly to “encourage everyone to enjoy this historical site by walking its paths, learning its history or simply as a quiet place to sit and contemplate”.

Without their voluntary labours, the place would simply slip back into dereliction.

The Sheffield General Cemetery features in Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Victorian Cemeteries, please click here.

Outside the box

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St Hilda's Church, Shiregreen, Sheffield (December 2011)

St Hilda’s Church, Shiregreen, Sheffield (December 2011)

Photo:  Midlands Churchcrawler

I didn’t realise when I first posted an article about St Hilda’s Church, Shiregreen, Sheffield how many of my neighbours I would stir up.

A local resident started a website to campaign for the future of the building – http://sthildas.webs.com/:  the associated petition attracted over three hundred signatures, most of them local.

I did an interview on BBC Radio Sheffield and an article has appeared in the Sheffield Star newspaper.

Local people woke up to the probability that a distinguished local landmark is about to disappear, and those individuals who have a past connection with St Hilda’s were particularly upset that it could disappear.

Since it finally closed for services in 2007, there seems to have been no mention or discussion of its fate in the local media, and I could find no proposal to replace it with any other kind of building.

Local politicians explained, politely but wearily, that the problem had been around for years, and say that they wouldn’t stand in the way of a practical, businesslike scheme to save the building.

Some national amenity societies were encouraging, but their brief is primarily to engage with English Heritage within their guidelines, which are interpreted to the disadvantage of St Hilda’s.

Members of the core group of supporters made contact with the Church Commissioners, who currently still owned the building.

One can’t blame the Church Commissioners for their disinclination to support a redundant building at the expense of the real work of the Church.  It’s a pity, nevertheless, that the situation wasn’t advertised a good deal more loudly in the streets that surround St Hilda’s.

Not everyone loved the building.  One commentator on a web forum said she thought it looked like a factory, which suggests a sanguine view of Sheffield’s industrial architecture.

In the Sheffield Local Studies Library I came across a run of parish magazines from the late 1980s which show exactly how a once thriving parish went downhill.

In April 1988, the month before the fiftieth anniversary of the consecration, the vicar, Father Roger Bellamy, enumerated the previous year’s rites of passage:   baptisms – 11;  confirmations – 0;  marriages – 0;  blessing of a marriage – 1;  funerals – 57.  He noted that fund-raising was “not a great success”.

At the end of 1988 he estimated the active membership of the parish at 42, and expected around ten of those to be “lost”, through age or migration, over the following year.

At the start of 1990 he commented:  “We are facing the realities of our situation:  a small congregation, a largeish building and a remarkable indifference to us from the parish.”

It’s not so much the eleventh hour as after midnight for St Hilda’s, too late – as it turned out – for those of us who live on the spot and care about the building’s existence to audit whether there really were community and commercial needs that it could serve, and to identify any positive, practical proposals to present to the owners and the planners.

Old-fashioned for its date

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St Catherine's Roman Catholic Church, Pitsmoor, Sheffield

St Catherine’s Roman Catholic Church, Pitsmoor, Sheffield

When I was collecting signatures for the petition to save St Hilda’s Church, Shiregreen, Sheffield, a gentleman who knows a thing or two about historic building conservation told me a scurrilous tale suggesting that listed-building inspectors aren’t always infallible.

Apparently the very fine Italianate St Catherine’s Roman Catholic Church, Pitsmoor, Sheffield was originally listed Grade II and dated “c1860”.

In fact, the original, temporary St Catherine’s by M E Hadfield & Son was built in 1884 on an entirely different site on Andover Street.

Eventually, the very fine permanent church that stands on the corner of Burngreave Road and Melrose Street was built to designs by the Halifax architects Charles Edward Fox & Son and consecrated with great ceremony in 1926.

Its interior is sumptuous:  black marble columns with Carrara capitals support a coffered ceiling over the nave.  The aisles are vaulted.  The chancel apse has a mosaic frieze with a cornice of Connemara marble, under which stands a baldachino, its canopy supporting a statue of Christ the King.

I’m told that when this date came to light English Heritage promptly delisted it on the grounds that it was so recent – and so old-fashioned for its date.

I’ve found no evidence to back this story, except that St Catherine’s does not appear on the current English Heritage list.

The fact that an authentic-looking Italian basilica was planted in the midst of inner-city Sheffield in the year of the General Strike is actually more significant than if it was simply a mid-Victorian Italianate church.

On the night of its consecration – the Feast of St Catherine – the Bishop of Leeds carried the Sacred Host from the temporary church to the new building in a torchlit procession.  Two thousand Sheffield Catholics turned out to witness their faith, and Canon Charles Leteux pointed out in an address to the crowds that “their public procession made history, for not twenty years before, a similar function in London had been banned by the orders of the Prime Minister”.

Apparently, the legislation banning public processions by clergy and members of the Roman Catholic Church was repealed soon after St Catherine’s opened.

It’s salutary to consider the power and energy that invested organised religion in Britain up to the Second World War.

For this reason, apart from its aesthetic value, St Catherine’s deserves to be recognised for its historic interest.  Fortunately, this church apparently continues to thrive, unlike so many.

Reformed chapel

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Wesleyan Reform Chapel, Bodmin Street, Attercliffe, Sheffield (1977)

Wesleyan Reform Chapel, Bodmin Street, Attercliffe, Sheffield (1977)

Former Wesleyan Reform Chapel, Bodmin Street, Attercliffe, Sheffield (2012)

Some buildings stick in the memory for entirely sentimental reasons.  I passed the Wesleyan Reform Chapel, Bodmin Street, Attercliffe, Sheffield every morning in my first five years of schooling.

My Auntie Nellie lived literally next door.  It formed the background to my earliest memories of backyard Bonfire Nights when Uncle Charlie was in charge of the box of matches:  in Coronation year the biggest bang of all came when Auntie Nellie’s new pressure-cooker, inexpertly screwed down, exploded and spattered mushy peas all over the kitchen ceiling.

My latest memory of this thriving temple of Methodism is of my cousin Cathryn singing at a chapel anniversary in the early 1960s.

It’s an austerely attractive, utterly unremarkable building, unlisted, invisible in the Sheffield Local Studies Library index.

Built in 1890, its foundation stones were laid by a star-studded cast of Sheffield’s most important Methodists, such as Jethro and Samson Chambers, Robert Hadfield and Frederick Mappin – all of them men of steel with Attercliffe connections, the latter two later to become baronets.

Its registration for marriages was cancelled because it was no longer used for worship in 1966.

My 1977 image of the building shows the brickwork still encrusted with industrial grime and most of the windows smashed.

No-one would have given tuppence for its chances of survival.

Nowadays it sparkles:  it’s well-maintained;  its windows are renewed and its brickwork is beautifully cleaned.  It serves as the Jamiyat Tableegh ul Islam Mosque.

So historic buildings which are not worth listing can survive if someone finds an appropriate use for them that will justify their upkeep.

Praised with faint damns

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St Hilda's Church, Shiregreen, Sheffield (December 2011)

St Hilda’s Church, Shiregreen, Sheffield (December 2011)

After I first expressed an interest in the threatened St Hilda’s Church, Shiregreen, Sheffield I was shown the Council for the Care of Churches 2006 report, from which I quoted in Church going, which recommended the building for listing.

I’ve now seen the latest English Heritage advice-report rejecting that recommendation.  The task of an English Heritage inspector is to evaluate the building in the context of its national significance, according to guidelines which are set out at http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/content/publications/docs/places_of_worship_final.pdf.  At the end of these guidelines (p 20) is a comment that “while all listed buildings are of national importance, local factors may sometimes be of significance”.

St Hilda’s failed the tests when it was last inspected in October 2011.  There’s more than a hint of de haut en bas about the inspector’s silky comments.

The architect, Leslie Moore, is described as a “junior partner” to his better-known father-in-law, which he would be, being the son-in-law.  The original design of 1922 had a “strong resemblance” to Temple Moore’s St Mary, Nunthorpe, but the rather different building of 1935-8 is “simplified down” – as if an imitation is preferable to an adaptation while still not quite good enough.

It’s described as a “plain rectangular box”, which it certainly isn’t, “old-fashioned for [its] date”, built of red engineering brick which is “common”, like most of inter-war Sheffield, and the interior, embellished by George Pace, is “austere”.  Ruth Harman and John Minnis clearly thought it merited an illustration in their Pevsner Architectural Guide Sheffield (2004), p 188.

All this suggests that if St Hilda’s has aesthetic worth, it belongs on a local list in “recognition of its architectural or historical importance and its value to the local community” [see https://www.sheffield.gov.uk/planning-and-city-development/urban-design–conservation/locallisting-.html].  Somehow, it seems not to have been considered so far as a candidate for the local list.

It’s not for me to assert that the national inspector and the local planners are wrong about St Hilda’s.  I think it’s a memorable, exciting, confident building that could once more be put to good use.  None of those epithets is necessarily a criterion for listing.

It would be peevish to point to listed buildings in the locality that might compare with St Hilda’s, but it is pertinent to point to some of the interesting, attractive and potentially useful structures that Sheffield has lost over the decades when listed-building legislation has existed to protect the built environment – the Britannia Music Hall, Huntsman’s Gardens Schools and the Pavilion Cinema, Attercliffe.

While St Hilda’s stands, there’s a chance of saving it – and it’s worth saving, whether it’s worth listing or not.

One less twentieth-century suburban church makes the others that remain marginally more valuable.

The failed campaign to save St Hilda’s Church, Shiregreen is featured in Demolished Sheffield, a 112-page full colour A4 publication by Mike Higginbottom.

For details please click here.

Church going

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St Hilda's Church, Shiregreen, Sheffield: interior view towards liturgical east (December 2011)

St Hilda’s Church, Shiregreen, Sheffield: interior view towards liturgical east (December 2011)

Photo:  Midlands Churchcrawler

I’ve learned more about the plight of St Hilda’s Church, Shiregreen, Sheffield as a result of my earlier article.

It seems that the verbal information on which Matthew Saunders, Secretary of the Ancient Monuments Society, based his report in the recent Newsletter was perhaps over-dramatic.

Recent images by an urban explorer show that though the building has indeed been repeatedly vandalised, the attempts at arson have not caused major damage, and that George Pace and Ron Sims’ screen and the eighteenth-century organ case from the bombed church of St James remain, battered but intact.

I sense that the vandals’ acrobatics on the roof could only have been motivated by a search for scrap:  since the roof itself is tiled, the most likely source of scrap metal would have been the organ pipes, if they remained in situ.

The Council for the Care of Churches 2006 report on the building describes it as “striking…very ambitious…for its setting…[with] considerable townscape value” and in conclusion commented, “A fine church by an architect whose work deserves to be re-evaluated, with a particularly good and dramatic…interior.”

It ends:  “The Council has previously voiced concern about the number of churches of this period being considered for redundancy, and thought this church of a quality comparable to many listed churches.”

A private individual has lodged an application for emergency listing with English Heritage, making a judgement that there remains enough about the building to justify listed-building protection.

I can understand entirely why the Church of England authorities are anxious to divest themselves of liability for a redundant structure.  They have enough work to do in their Christian mission.

However, I don’t see why that must involve destroying the local heritage.  I’ve yet to hear of any positive proposal to use the site in any new way.

St Hilda’s, prominent on its ridge about Firth Park, belongs to the locality.  It offers substantial, well-built space for local people’s social activities.

If it remains standing, someone in the future can find a worthwhile use for it.  Once it’s gone, it’s gone for ever.

One less twentieth-century suburban church makes the others that remain marginally more valuable.

And with it would go a relatively economical opportunity to offer local people somewhere to congregate, which St Hilda’s was for decades before, during and after the Second World War. Philip Larkin, in his poem ‘Church going’ [The Less Deceived, 1955], asked – When churches will fall completely out of use What we shall turn them into…? “Rubble” was not the answer he was looking for.

The failed campaign to save St Hilda’s Church, Shiregreen is featured in Demolished Sheffield, a 112-page full colour A4 publication by Mike Higginbottom.

For details please click here.

Losing a landmark

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St Hilda's Church, Shiregreen, Sheffield (December 2011)

St Hilda’s Church, Shiregreen, Sheffield (December 2011)

I learned from that fountain of useful information and news, the Ancient Monuments Society Newsletter, that the only historic building I can see from my office window is about to disappear.

St Hilda’s Parish Church, Shiregreen is an interesting inter-war brick church on a literally outstanding site.  It stands on an abrupt cliff-edge alongside the Flower Estate, itself a notable landmark of early-twentieth century municipal housing [see Ruth Harman & John Minnis, Sheffield (Pevsner Architectural Guides 2004), pp 185-8, http://www.lookingatbuildings.org.uk/cities/sheffield/the-flower-estate.html and http://www.lookingatbuildings.org.uk/cities/sheffield/the-flower-estate/tour-part-2.html].

The church was designed by Leslie Moore (1883-1957) in 1935-8, presumably to serve the council estate and the slightly earlier community down the hill.  Moore made clever use of an extremely steep site, building his nave above a community room, accessible by steep steps built into the hillside.

The interior was high quality:  the white-and-gold classical gallery by the York architect George Pace (1915-1975) supported an eighteenth-century organ case with pipes brought from the blitzed city-centre church of St James.

St Hilda’s was closed, no doubt surplus to requirements, in 2007.

The Newsletter tells the regrettable tale of three arson attacks and some spectacularly energetic vandalism (which I suspect was an attempt at theft of lead organ-pipes).  The only way intruders could penetrate the secured building was to climb on to the roof ridge and then drop down through an access door behind the bell turret.  This is 35 metres above the sloping ground level.

I can’t help thinking that the athleticism and ingenuity behind such burglary would command a healthy wage in a healthy legitimate economy.

Apparently, the Church Commissioners and the Diocese of Sheffield have given up any attempt to save the building and intend it to be demolished.

This is a pity.  The local community is not blessed with public spaces, or indeed social opportunities.  The precipitous plot on which the church stands won’t be easy to redevelop.  The views from the site are magnificent, but any replacement structure will need high-quality design to deserve a place in the landscape.

There’s an obvious argument for mothballing St Hilda’s in the hope of better economic times, sometime in the indefinable future.  But it’s only practical if there’s some guarantee that the local villains won’t keep trashing the place, and possibly killing themselves, in the process.

The saddest fact of all, of course, is that it’s a fine building nobody wants.  It’s not the first time that Sheffield has lost a useful historic building because no-one – owners, city planners, local amenity groups, interested individuals like me – took sufficient notice to appreciate its value [See Rue Britannia].

I can’t imagine why St Hilda’s isn’t listed.  And if you don’t use it, you lose it.

A detailed examination of the challenges facing the Anglican Church in north Sheffield is posted at http://sheffield.anglican.org/attachments/275_Final%20Report.pdf.

The Ancient Monuments Society can be contacted at http://www.ancientmonumentssociety.org.uk.  The Twentieth Century Society, which has a brief to support and conserve buildings dating from after 1914, is at http://www.c20society.org.uk.

One less twentieth-century suburban church makes the others that remain marginally more valuable.

The failed campaign to save St Hilda’s Church, Shiregreen is featured in Demolished Sheffield, a 112-page full colour A4 publication by Mike Higginbottom.

For details please click here.

Rue Britannia

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Britannia Music Hall, West Bar, Sheffield (1984)

Britannia Music Hall, West Bar, Sheffield (1984)

The surviving mid-nineteenth century music halls in the UK can almost be counted on one hand – Wilton’s and the Hoxton Hall in London, the Old Malt Cross and the Talbot (latterly Yates’s Wine Lodge and now Slug & Lettuce) in Nottingham, the City Varieties in Leeds and the Britannia in Glasgow.  Sheffield had a couple of surviving examples until the 1990s, and one of them at least was worth saving.

In the second half of the nineteenth century West Bar, which runs along the valley floor below the hill on which the town centre had grown, was what the journalist Steve McClarence described as “the Shaftesbury Avenue of the Sheffield working man”.  Here stood the Surrey Music Hall, which burnt down spectacularly in 1865, the Bijou (which survived as a tacky cinema into the 1930s), the London Apprentice (demolished in the 1970s) and the Gaiety, of which fragments survived until it was demolished c2000 to clear space for the Inner Ring Road.

The Gaiety in its heyday was owned by Louis Metzger, a pork-butcher.  He kept a musical pig called Lucy who, if plied with beer, would sing – as indeed a pig owned by a pork-butcher might.

The Britannia Music Hall on West Bar stood literally next door to the former police- and fire-station that is now the National Emergency Services Museum.  Built on the back-land behind the older Tankard Tavern, it dated from around the mid-1850s, and was superseded by bigger, better and more central variety theatres in the 1890s.

Incredibly, it survived as a bathroom showroom, intact but altered with a floor built across the proscenium and a lift-shaft at the back of the auditorium, and was described in detail by historian Andrew Woodfield in 1978.  When I first encountered it in 1984 it was Pink Champagne, providing wedding goods and, it appeared, a venue for wedding receptions.

In February 1988, by which time it was operating as Harmony Wedding World, Ian McMillan and the late Martyn Wiley broadcast their BBC Radio Sheffield Saturday-morning show from the Britannia and an actor called Stuart Howson (whose great-grandfather had managed the Regent Theatre in the east end of Sheffield) gave the final performance, a couple of verses of a Victorian ballad, ‘The best of the bunch’.

Later the building became Door World and then, just as Sheffield City Council prepared to put a preservation order on it in 1992, it went up in flames and was quickly demolished.

There was much hand-wringing by the Council, the Hallamshire Historic Buildings Society, the Theatres Trust and the site-owners, West Bar Partnership who (in The Stage, April 4th 1992) “expressed regret”.  The fact remains that conservationists have to win every battle, while the developer only has to win one.

The space where the Britannia stood is now used for car sales.

The loss of the Britannia Music Hall is described and illustrated in Demolished Sheffield, a 112-page full colour A4 publication by Mike Higginbottom.

For details please click here.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Fun Palaces:  the history and architecture of the entertainment industry please click here.

Not quite paradise

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Paradise Square, Sheffield

Paradise Square, Sheffield

For all its reputation as a gritty Victorian town, bombed and repeatedly redeveloped over recent generations, Sheffield is not short of Georgian buildings, but it has only one Georgian square – Paradise Square (1736 and 1771-c1790), down the hill from the parish church, now the Anglican Cathedral.

In fact, substantial parts of Paradise Square are neo-neo-Georgian, tactfully reinstated after World War II bombing by the long-established Sheffield architectural partnership, Hadfield Cawkwell Davidson in 1963-6.  According to Ruth Harman & John Minnis’ Pevsner Architectural Guide, Sheffield (Yale University Press 2004), nos 18 and 26 are almost entirely rebuilt and no 10 was refaced “in ill-chosen brick” c1985.

Nevertheless, the atmosphere of this steeply sloping space, once a bustling market known as “Pot Square”, remains evocative of when Sheffield was a metal-bashing cutlery town, vibrant with religious and political dissent.

Here is where sermons and turbulent meetings took place, sometimes ending in violence.  In 1779 John Wesley preached here to “the largest congregation I ever saw on a weekday”. 

There are repeated claims of audiences of eight to twelve thousand people crammed into this space [http://www.sheffieldhistory.co.uk/forums/index.php?showtopic=6534].

Really?  Twelve thousand is the capacity of the Sheffield Arena, an indoor space far bigger than Paradise Square with raked seating as well as a flat floor.

Who counts these crowds?  And how?

Let’s simply assume that when elections were much livelier affairs than nowadays, this elegant Georgian space, now the exclusive home of lawyers, surveyors and my accountant, would have been packed to capacity, and when the Chartists cut up rough and “the town was kept in great agitation the whole night” it would have been a dangerous place to hang around.