Category Archives: Sheffield’s Heritage

Corpulent feline

The Fat Cat (former Alma Hotel), Alma Street, Sheffield

The Fat Cat (former Alma Hotel), Alma Street, Sheffield

The Fat Cat is a Sheffield legend:  http://www.thefatcat.co.uk/86index.htm.  It’s not the only award-winning real-ale pub in the city – there’s another round the corner on the next street – but it was the first, and it has a special place in the affections of beer-drinkers.  It welcomes anyone who enjoys civilised traditional conviviality and home-cooked food within easy access of public transport – so you don’t have to drive home (though there’s ample car-parking if you do).

There was a Kelham Tavern on the site by the 1830s.  After the street was named Alma Street to commemorate the Crimean battle of 1854, the pub was renamed the Alma Hotel.

The exact date of the present building is unclear:  it’s of straightforward artisan construction, with a traditional bar inside.  Though it has been extended, the only significant architectural alteration is the blocking of the original corner entrance door.

For many years it was crowded by surrounding housing and the noise and dirt of heavy industry.  Now it’s much quieter.

The saving of the Alma Hotel was Stones’ Brewery’s failure to implement 1952 planning permission to extend the building, doubling the number of bedrooms to eight and creating an open-plan interior.

Because the building survived intact while the local community contracted, it was an ideal location for Dave Wickett and Bruce Bentley’s scheme to reintroduce traditional beers to Sheffield.  They gave the building its current name when they opened in 1981 serving beers from independent breweries.  The first pint was pulled by the much-loved Sheffield football legend, Derek Dooley.

Their policy has proved durable and enormously successful:  good beer well served, home-cooked food ranging from carnivore to vegan, no piped music or gaming machines.

Dave Wickett became sole owner in 1989 and began brewing beer behind the pub the following year.  Within ten years he built the Kelham Island Brewery next door, and now you can find his beer in real-ale pubs across the country, and buy bottles in Waitrose.

Dave Wickett died, aged 64, on May 16th 2012:  http://www.thestar.co.uk/community/real-ale-legend-who-revitalised-city-dies-64-1-4554900.  The Fat Cat is a memorial to a man who added a great deal to the sum of human happiness.

Iron curtain at the Abbeydale

Abbeydale Cinema, Sheffield:  auditorium (1987)

Abbeydale Cinema, Sheffield: auditorium (1987)

While the Adelphi Cinema lay dark Sheffield’s other listed cinema building found a practical use as a performance building.

I’ve a soft spot for the Abbeydale Cinema.  Though I only ever once saw a film there, I repeatedly visited it in the 1980s when it was an office-equipment showroom – an unexpected fate for a superannuated cinema.  The company that bought it, A & F Drake Ltd, sold filing cabinets and office desks in the stalls and balcony, and separately operated the former ballroom and billiard hall in the basement as a snooker club.  The Drakes and their manager, Ian Humphreys, repeatedly allowed me to take adult-education groups to see the place from top to bottom, and on one occasion Ian McMillan and Martyn Wiley broadcast Radio Sheffield’s Saturday morning show live from the Abbeydale auditorium.

Because the Drakes had the imagination to find a productive use for the building – they regarded it as a better customer attraction than an anonymous box on a trading estate – it survived intact long enough to attract the attention of a Friends’ group who are restoring it as a venue for film and amateur dramatics.  Cinemas in the 1920s featured live performance as well as silent movies, and the Abbeydale had an organ – long ago destroyed – and still has a full-scale stage with wings, fly-tower and dressing-rooms.

Even more interesting is the iron safety-curtain, which has remained in situ even after Drakes jacked up the stage-floor six feet to create more space for their wares.  This must date back to the 1920s, but its unique interest is the complete set of painted advertisements that faced audiences between films.  Clifford Shaw, the greatest expert on Sheffield cinemas, has dated the existing adverts to the 1950s.  Ian Humphreys observed to me in the 1980s that all but one of the businesses advertised had by that time folded.  The Cinema Theatre Association reports that, to the best of their knowledge, no other cinema safety-curtain survives with contemporary advertisements, and for this reason is supporting the proposal to upgrade the listing.

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

 

Picture palace gathers dust

Former Adelphi Cinema, Attercliffe, Sheffield (1985)

Former Adelphi Cinema, Attercliffe, Sheffield (1985)

The Adelphi Cinema (1920) on Vicarage Road, Attercliffe, is one of Sheffield’s two listed cinemas alongside the more prominent and interesting Abbeydale Picture House on the other side of the city.

Originally located up a cul-de-sac, it has an interesting façade of buff and blue faience with a stubby little dome, designed to catch the eye.  Now that the surrounding buildings have been cleared, it’s more visible from the main road and forms one of a group of historic buildings alongside the former Attercliffe Baths (1879), the former Attercliffe Library (1894) and one of Attercliffe’s two Burton’s stores.

All these survive alongside the site of the Don Valley Stadium, formerly Brown Bayley’s steelworks, and now being redeveloped:  there is an opportunity waiting to be taken to develop the possibilities of this location.  The Baths have been converted into a largely sterile office and conference facility, which at least safeguards the fabric, and the Library has recently opened as a splendid café and restaurant [Sheffield | Restauraunt & Bar | The Library by Lounge | Attercliffe] but the Adelphi remains dark.

The Adelphi closed as a cinema in 1967, and operated as a bingo club until well into the 1980s.  There was a project to take advantage of its elegant classical interior as a gay club, and eventually it was transformed into a rock venue.  It was listed Grade II in 1996 but after a period as a music-teaching venue in 2000-2006 it fell into neglect.

By 2013 it was used as a storage facility, and someone went to great trouble to strip out the original plasterwork.

This was an object-lesson in how not to treat a listed building.

Yet the Adelphi stands on the main road between Sheffield, Rotherham and the M1 motorway.  There’s no shortage of car-parking.

It’s a possibility waiting to be turned into a practicality.

Plans are afoot to rescue the Adelphi:  The new Adelphi | Mike Higginbottom Interesting Times.

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

Picture palace bites the dust

Pavilion Cinema, Attercliffe (1982)

Pavilion Cinema, Attercliffe (1982)

Another building that the Victorian Society South Yorkshire group couldn’t visit during their Attercliffe walk in 2010 was the Pavilion Cinema, opened in 1915 and eventually demolished in 1982.

Though the original plans show that a classical interior was intended, in fact the auditorium was mock-Tudor, with black-and-white timbering, strapwork and lanterns as house-lights.  The auditorium was distinguished by side boxes, as in a theatre, very popular with couples:  the cinema management had an interesting strategy of pricing these box seats at 3/- for five people.

The Pavilion was converted to bingo briefly in 1970 and then became an Asian cinema:  at some point the owners repainted the entire auditorium in raspberry pink and two shades of blue.

When demolition began, in the innocent days before security fencing, I explored and photographed the entire building, primarily because it was one of the two Attercliffe cinemas that my parents patronised regularly on Saturday nights.  (My dad, who wasn’t nicknamed “Scottie” for nothing, declared around 1954 that we wouldn’t buy a television because they’d soon be making colour ones.)

I alerted the Victorian Society to the imminent demise of this unusual building, to be told that no-one had any idea how unusual it was, because no survey of Sheffield cinemas had been attempted.

So I tramped around the city checking out the survivors and was briefly the greatest living expert on the subject until Richard Ward produced his book In Memory of Sheffield Cinemas (Sheffield City Libraries 1988).  (I happen to know that Richard wanted the book to be titled A Memory… but made the common error of dictating his intention over the phone.)

I’ll always have a soft spot for the Pavilion, not so much because it was part of my childhood as because it kick-started my interest in the architecture of the entertainment industry, and led me to run continuing-education courses and study tours about pubs, theatres, cinemas and the seaside under the umbrella title ‘Fun Palaces’.

And that has proved to be one of the most enjoyable aspects of all my history work.

The demolition of the Pavilion Cinema, Attercliffe is 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.

Huntsman’s Gardens

Huntsman's Gardens Schools, Attercliffe, Sheffield:  central hall during demolition (1980)

Huntsman’s Gardens Schools, Attercliffe, Sheffield: central hall during demolition (1980)

When the Victorian Society South Yorkshire Group visited the historic buildings of Attercliffe in 2010, one of the buildings they couldn’t see – being thirty years too late – was my early alma mater, Huntsman’s Gardens Schools, demolished as part of the Sheffield Development Corporation’s wholesale clearance of parts of the valley in preparation for the World Student Games event in 1981.

The name Huntsman’s Gardens commemorates the schools’ location alongside the Attercliffe works (established in 1770) of the inventor of crucible steel, Benjamin Huntsman (1704-1776). Round the corner on Worksop Road, the Britannia Inn still carries on its gable the date 1772 in numerals reputedly cast by Huntsman.

The huge school complex was one of the magnificent series of Sheffield School Board structures designed by Charles J Innocent and Thomas Brown from 1871 onwards.  Huntsman’s Gardens dated from 1884, and was an impressive example of the so-called Prussian model of building classrooms with glass partitions around a central hall so that the headteacher could supervise teaching and learning across the whole school without patrolling corridors in crepe soles.

Huntsman’s Gardens, like many of the surviving Innocent & Brown schools across Sheffield, was characterised by solid walls, faced in stone, and huge, high windows to make the most of the light in a polluted industrial environment.  My memories of school in the 1950s include whole days when the lights remained on in classrooms because the sun couldn’t penetrate the smog.

Most memorable of all, however, especially for a seven-year-old, was the enormous height of the school hall.  I don’t ever remember feeling cold, but I’ve no idea how such an enormous space was heated.

In 1980 the building was razed without much comment.  If it had somehow survived a couple more decades, it would have presented an interesting challenge for redevelopment – bigger than the Leeds Corn Exchange (now a shopping centre), far more dramatic than any other surviving Victorian school for miles around.

The Victorian Society South Yorkshire group’s publication Building Schools for Sheffield, 1870-1914 is obtainable from http://www.victoriansociety.org.uk/publications/sheffield-schools.

The demolition of Huntsman’s Gardens Schools is illustrated in Demolished Sheffield, a 112-page full colour A4 publication by Mike Higginbottom.

For details please click here.

Where sparrows coughed

Banner's Department Store, Attercliffe, Sheffield (1977)

Banner’s Department Store, Attercliffe, Sheffield (1977)

The South Yorkshire Group of the Victorian Society runs a series of history walks around the city through the summer months [see http://www.victoriansociety.org.uk/south-yorkshire].  These excursions are always led by someone who has done detailed research into the locality, often supplemented by others who can add further knowledge.

I particularly enjoyed one of the 2010 walks around Attercliffe, the heart of the steel industry in Sheffield’s Lower Don Valley, because that’s where I grew up in the 1950s.  Most of the vibrant post-war life of the valley has long gone, leaving a few isolated standing relics, some of them architectural, others human.

There was a moment, at the height of the Second World War, when a well-placed German bomb dropped on the east end of Sheffield could have dished the only forge in Britain capable of producing Spitfire crankshafts.  Fortunately, the Luftwaffe’s radar beams, positioned directly over the Wellington Inn on Hawke Street, somehow failed to guide the pilots, who in one blitz-attack destroyed much of the city-centre, and in the other hit anywhere but the crucial quarter square mile.

After the war, the valley continued to thrive – grimy, smog-laden and industrial, yet home to some 55,000 workers.  In the 1950s Attercliffe boasted a Woolworth’s, two Burton’s tailors, a Littlewood’s store, four cinemas and a live theatre.

It also had its own family-run department store, Banner’s.  Shoppers from Rotherham, travelling into Sheffield by tram and later by bus, often stopped off at Attercliffe, rather than travel all the way into the city-centre.

Writers such as Keith Farnsworth, Sheffield’s East Enders:  life as it was in the Lower Don Valley (Sheffield City Libraries 1987), and Frank Hartley, Where sparrows coughed (Sheaf 1989) and Dancing on the cobbles (Sheaf 1992), describe how there was plenty of work, and in general wages were sufficient, but there was very little to spend it on in the days of austerity.

And almost everyone lived in a terraced house with an outside lavatory and no bathroom.

By the time I left Sheffield in 1958, the terraced streets were disappearing as “slum clearance”, and the old community ties were quickly broken.  Some of the late-surviving housing made homes for the first generation of immigrants from the Caribbean and South Asia, but they too had moved away by the 1980s.

Indeed, a VicSoc history walk round Attercliffe in 1980 would have come across even more interesting buildings than survive today.

Andy Moffatt wrote a detailed account of growing up in Attercliffe just before the community finally disappeared at http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/sheffield/hi/people_and_places/newsid_8172000/8172074.stm and has his own website at http://www.70sheffieldlad.co.uk/index.html.

All sorts of stories about Beulah Road

Hillsborough Leisure Centre, Beulah Road, Sheffield

Hillsborough Leisure Centre, Beulah Road, Sheffield

I will always have a particular regard for the Hillsborough Leisure Centre, the third and smallest of Sheffield’s World Student Games sports facilities, because members of its staff saved my life when I had a cardiac arrest in the gym.  It’s because of Mel who pressed the panic button, Ryan who ran for the defibrillator and John who kick-started me to excellent effect that I’m here to write this.

Until the Centre was built in 1991, Beulah Road was lined with typical Sheffield artisan terraced houses, which before they were demolished figured as a location in the gloomy, award-winning Barry Hines/Mick Jackson TV film, Threads (1984).  My mate Phil’s uncles lived here, and there are glorious family tales of their fanatical devotion to Sheffield Wednesday FC.  One of the uncles apparently threw himself in the River Don once when his team lost.  The river is at least a foot deep at this point.

Sheffield Wednesday is so-called because it was originally a butchers’ side, and they played on early-closing day which was, in the late-nineteenth century, Wednesday.  Though the ground is officially called Hillsborough, it more or less stands in Owlerton, which is why the team are called the Owls, and devoted fans go to considerable lengths to acquire car-registrations ending in OWL.

(Sheffield United’s colours are red and white, apparently because of the red headscarves of the formidable buffer girls who polished the blades of Sheffield-made cutlery, which is probably why their team is known as the Blades.)

But the Beulah Road landmark that means most in Sheffield’s history and popular culture is the factory of George Bassett & Co, whose salesman accidentally tipped his display box of liquorice sweets all over a customer’s shop counter, and before he could replace them neatly in their compartments was offered an order for them as they were – “all sorts”.

 

Brown Bayley’s

Sheffield Canal and Brown Bayley's steelworks, later the site of the Don Valley Stadium (1978)

Sheffield Canal and Brown Bayley’s steelworks, later the site of the Don Valley Stadium (1978)

On one of my visits to the gym at the now-demolished Don Valley Stadium in Sheffield’s east end, I suddenly realised that I was pumping iron (in a desultory manner) on the exact site where, seventy years before, my grandfather had built the brick linings for the furnaces of Brown Bayley’s steelworks.

My granddad’s skills must have been quite specialised, and on the strength of his wartime earnings my grandmother kept family state in a terraced house with a postage-stamp front garden and a privet hedge.

That world of metal-bashing heavy steel largely disappeared in the early 1980s.  (The Full Monty, filmed as contemporary in 1997, actually relates to a context fifteen years earlier.)  The great corrugated iron sheds of the works backing on to the Sheffield Canal vanished, were replaced by a magnificent athletics complex with its distinctive tent-like stands, made of Teflon-coated glass fibre, providing covered accommodation for 10,000 spectators.

This cleverly designed space was orientated so that the principal seats did not face the daytime sun, and the finishing straight avoided the glare of sunset.  Wind-tunnel tests determined that, because of the sheltering terrace-embankments, ambient wind-speed was cut by 70% at the stadium-floor.

After the World Student Games of 1991, the Stadium proved an admirable home for the Sheffield Eagles rugby-league club and latterly for Rotherham United FC after their original home at Millmoor was sold.

It also offered capacity of up to 40,000 spectators for huge rock concerts by the likes of the Rolling Stones and U2.  Those who didn’t wish to pay the price, or see the artistes, could hear it all perfectly clearly while picnicking on the banks of the Sheffield Canal.

My granddad wouldn’t have believed it.

The stadium was in turn closed in September 2013, demolished and redeveloped.

Ponds Forge

Ponds Forge, Sheffield (1978)

Ponds Forge, Sheffield (1978)

Ponds Forge” for most people who know Sheffield nowadays means the huge swimming and sports complex that was built in 1991 as part of the city’s investment in the World Student Games, a one-off event to which Sheffield council-tax payers continue to contribute.

Names often indicate hidden history.

Underneath the sports centre runs the River Sheaf in a culvert:  whether or not the river was named after the sheaves of corn harvested by its banks, it certainly gave its name to the city of Sheffield, and the sheaves duly appear on the municipal coat of arms.

North of the site stands the 1960s Castle Market, which was refused listing as a building of historic and architectural interest and has disappeared, once again uncovering the vestigial remains of the medieval Sheffield Castle, which was destroyed after the Civil War.

Ponds Forge, and the adjacent Pond Street which gave its name to the central bus station, took the name from the ponds which provided a supply of fish for the castle and, presumably, the town in the Middle Ages.

In the days when Sheffield industry made things, Ponds Forge belonged to George Senior & Sons, and the adjacent Ponds Works was owned by a toolmaker, Marsh Brothers.  By the 1970s, these businesses had ceased, and Ponds Forge was for a number of years an architectural antiques repository, from which friends of mine bought the doors of a defunct local cinema.

When the Ponds Forge International Sports Centre was erected, to the designs of Faulkner Browns, who also built Center Parcs, Nottinghamshire (1987) and the Doncaster Dome Leisure Centre (1989), George Senior’s pedimented and pilastered gateway was carefully re-erected round the corner, scrubbed to within an inch of its life.

By these means, tenuous connections survive of a history that deserves not to be forgotten.

Genius of the knife, fork and spoon

David Mellor Factory, Hathersage, Derbyshire

David Mellor Factory, Hathersage, Derbyshire

My friends Doug and Marion, who share my appetite for life-enhancing experiences, took me to the David Mellor Factory  [http://www.davidmellordesign.com/visitor-centreat Hathersage, in Derbyshire, recently.

David Mellor (1930-2009) is a fascinating figure.  A Sheffield lad, the son of a toolmaker, he was the beneficiary of an education system that allowed him to begin training at art school in metalwork, pottery, woodwork, painting and decorating at the age of eleven.

As a teenage student at the Royal College of Art he designed his first cutlery, ‘Pride’, which was manufactured by the Sheffield company, Walker & Hall, in 1953, and remains David Mellor Designs’ best-selling range.  Later cutlery designs include ‘Symbol’ (1963), the first stainless-steel mass-produced cutlery, for Walker & Hall, ‘Embassy’ (1963) for use in UK embassies across the world, and ‘Thrift’ (1965), a further Government commission which combined economy with good design by reducing the number of items in a place-setting from eleven to five for bulk institutional orders ranging from prisons to railway buffets.

He made Sheffield his base, and became famous not only for cutlery, but also for Eclipse saws for James Neil, garden shears for Burgon & Ball, and much, much else.  Working with the Abacus company, he redesigned the standard British traffic-light and pedestrian crossing (1965-70).  He devised a bus shelter that ran to 140,000 units and, at the request of the Postmaster General, Tony Benn, rethought the traditional post-box:  his square design was intended to be easier to empty, but encountered much public resistance because it wasn’t round.  A letter-writer to the Scotsman newspaper complained that it would endanger passing drunks.

His first customised workshop building in Park Lane, Sheffield, was designed by Patric Guest in the early 1960s and is now a listed building.  He then took over the derelict Broom Hall, once the home of the Jessop family and dating back to the late fifteenth century, and turned it into a integrated living space and workshop, described in his Guardian obituary as “a rare example of a family house containing a 55-ton blanking press, a 180-ton coining press and two grinding machines”.

Then, in 1990, he moved his business out to the Peak District National Park, taking over the site of the former Hathersage gasworks:  here the factory, the famous Round Building, was built on the base of the demolished gasholder with a roof derived from the principle of the bicycle wheel, upending the Sheffield tradition of fragmented cutlery manufacture so that the processes were integrated within a single space.

The architect was David Mellor’s friend, Sir Michael Hopkins (1935-2023), whose other work includes Portcullis House opposite the Houses of Parliament, the Mound Stand at Lord’s, and the Inland Revenue building and the initial phase of the University Jubilee Campus in Nottingham.

Hopkins returned to Hathersage to convert the retort house and other ancillary buildings on the site into a shop, a restaurant and the David Mellor Design Museum, opened in 2006.

David Mellor married Fiona MacCarthy (1940-2020), the biographer:  their son Corin Mellor (b 1966) is now Creative Director of David Mellor Design, while their daughter Clare (b 1970) is a graphic designer.

David Mellor’s Sheffield-born near-contemporary, Roy Hattersley, added this comment to the Guardian obituary:  “William Morris urged his followers:  ‘Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.’  Mellor extended that precept to Britain’s streets.  In the argot of Mellor’s home town, ‘he did all right’.”

The David Mellor Factory is on the B6001 south of Hathersage, just beyond the railway station.  The café is excellent and the design museum fascinating;  factory tours are held at the weekend.

The David Mellor Factory opened a new Street Scene exhibition in September 2013:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-23977482.

The most comprehensive account of David Mellor’s life and work is Fiona MacCarthy’s David Mellor Master Metalworker (David Mellor Design 2013).

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2016 The Derbyshire Derwent Valley tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.