Category Archives: Sheffield’s Heritage

Ponds Forge

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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

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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-centre] at 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.

Tried and tested

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Sheffield Assay Office

Sheffield Assay Office

When my mate retired as a dentist, he surprised me by trotting off to the Sheffield Assay Office [http://www.assayoffice.co.uk] with a jamjar.  It turned out that he’d been collecting scrap gold fillings for thirty-odd years to cash in on his retirement.  Melted down into a dull-looking ingot (the colour, I’m assured, caused by the presence of other precious metals), this produced a healthy little nest-egg.  The Assay Office provides a certificate of the metallic content which is immediately acceptable to precious-metals dealers and offers virtually instant conversion to a satisfying cheque.

It’s an indication of Sheffield’s status as a manufacturing city of fine metalwork that, like Birmingham, it supports an assay office alongside the capital cities of London, Edinburgh and Dublin.  Eighteenth-century manufacturers of cutlery and silver ornaments in Sheffield collaborated with the metal workers of Birmingham to obtain the right to test the quality of local precious-metal products in 1773.  The meetings to campaign for the necessary Act of Parliament took place at the Crown & Anchor pub on London’s Strand:  as a result of the toss of a coin, it is said, Birmingham took as its place-mark the anchor and Sheffield the crown.  (The crown symbol was changed in 1975, and now Sheffield ware is identified by a Tudor rose.)

I had an opportunity to tour the Sheffield Assay Office earlier this year with the Art Fund South Yorkshire Group [http://www.artfund.org].  Emma Paragreen, the Assay Office’s Librarian/Curator, gave an introductory talk, and there was a tour of the analytical and marking areas of the new Guardians’ Hall, opened in 2008.

The interiors of the new premises in Hillsborough are decorated with oak panelling from the previous building, carved with the complete sequence of Sheffield date marks from 1773 onwards.  A selection from the Assay Office collection of silver is displayed, including new items which are commissioned from local craftsmen and women annually.

The culture of the Sheffield metal trades combines practicality with elegance.  The clothes brushes in the splendid gents’ lavatory are hand-made.  We do things properly in Sheffield.

Breakfast with the Pudding Ladies

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Sheffield: Bole Hills and Rivelin Valley

Sheffield: Bole Hills and Rivelin Valley

One of the great privileges of reaching the age of sixty is having a bus pass.

When my mate Richard reached his sixtieth birthday we made a point of meeting for breakfast in order to celebrate both his birthday and his new-found freedom.

At some expense (because before 9.30 am you have to pay bus fare even if you’re sixty) we met in the Sheffield suburb of Hillsborough in order to catch the once-every-two-hours bus to Rivelin Post Office.  We travelled in state, because no-one else got on or got off, and from the terminus walked down the picturesque Rivelin Valley, past ponds and waterfalls that in the era of water-powered industry had been dams and mills.

Sheffield has a much better known route, the Round Walk, which follows the River Porter through the elegant Victorian western suburbs.  Rivelin, on the north of the city, is much less frequented, but just as attractive.  All it lacks is more thorough interpretation:  we knew we were looking at historically interesting scenery, but only one notice-board told us anything about it.

There are other priorities, however.  Our goal was the Pudding Ladies’ Café [http://www.rivelinparkcafe.co.uk] which offers smoked-salmon and creamed-cheese bagels for breakfast.  (Richard had bacon and creamed cheese, which seemed to me a little eccentric.)  When his wife Janet appeared, she had kippers and scrambled egg.

Janet looked a little surprised when Richard declined a lift back so he could ride home on Supertram for free.

The guy has style.

Why Jeffie?

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Jeffie Bainbridge Children's Centre inscription, Norfolk Street, Sheffield

Jeffie Bainbridge Children’s Centre inscription, Norfolk Street, Sheffield

For years I wondered, when I walked along Norfolk Street in Sheffield’s city-centre, about the carved stone on the corner of the Halifax Bank, which says “JEFFIE BAINBRIDGE CHILDREN’S SHELTER”.  Why, in particular, does the lettering say “Jeffie” rather than “Jessie”?

The building which now contains the bank was built in 1893-4 by Emerson Muschamp Bainbridge (1845-1911), a towering figure in nineteenth-century industry in the north of England.  He was the son of the founder of Bainbridge’s department store in Newcastle-on-Tyne, trained as a mining engineer, and became manager of the Sheffield, Tinsley and Nunnery Collieries in Sheffield.  His industrial directorships extended to other collieries in Yorkshire, and he was effectively the founder of the colliery and village of New Bolsover in Derbyshire.  He was also a director of the Yorkshire Engine Company, and an instigator of the huge Lancashire, Derbyshire & East Coast Railway (which ultimately only extended from Chesterfield to Lincoln), intended to connect Warrington on the Mersey with a major coal-exporting port to be built at Sutton-on-Sea (and which was eventually built at Immingham).

He was MP for Gainsborough from 1895 to 1900, built a villa near Monte Carlo and purchased a 40,000 acre deer-forest in Ross-shire.  He died worth a quarter of a million pounds (worth according to http://www.measuringworth.com/ukcompare/result.php nearly £19 million now).

He was a strong supporter of the YMCA, and his building on the corner of Norfolk Street and Surrey Street was partly intended to house the YMCA headquarters.  He also provided a children’s shelter, the Jeffie Bainbridge Home for Waifs & Strays, which included a dining room and dormitories for homeless children and was opened by the Duke and Duchess of Portland.  The interior was swept away behind the façade in 1977-8.

Why Jeffie?  Emerson Bainbridge’s first wife was born Eliza Jefferson Armstrong (died 1892);  their daughter was Eva Jeffie Bainbridge.  Jeffie is simply short for Jefferson.

Leah’s Yard

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Sheffield Retail Quarter: Leah's Yard [foreground]; St Matthew's Church, Carver Street [background] (2006)

Sheffield Retail Quarter: Leah’s Yard [foreground]; St Matthew’s Church, Carver Street [background] (2006)

Cambridge Street typifies the heart of Sheffield’s city centre:  at the top end, one side is occupied by the 1960s former John Lewis store;  opposite is an abbreviated string of pubs and restaurants – Yates, ASK Italian, and a Wetherspoon’s called the Benjamin Huntsman.  Others have disappeared in the turmoil of redevelopment – the utterly unreconstructed Sportsman pub and another bar called the Cutler, and at the next corner Henry’s.

Scratch the surface, though, and it all becomes much more interesting:  the ironwork front to part of the Benjamin Huntsman pub is all that’s left of a coachbuilder’s works of 1878;  the  shopfront to the former John Lewis annex hides an imposing gabled Primitive Methodist chapel of 1835;  the Cutler occupied that chapel’s brick, gabled Sunday School.

Sitting right in the middle of this block, next to the Sportsman pub, is a façade which is the key to the history of the street and the area.

Leah’s Yard dates from the second half of the nineteenth century, originally known as the Cambridge Street Horn Works (presumably making handles for table cutlery) and later named after Henry Leah, who made die stamps here from 1892.  It’s an intact example of a Sheffield “Little Mesters” works, brick workshops with generous windows for light and external stairs on a long narrow site running back from the street.

Cambridge Street was originally Coalpit Lane, when Sheffield’s craftsman trades crowded into the town centre.  Yet even in its heyday this area was not uniformly industrial:  the Bethel Chapel and its Sunday school are only a few doors down;  across the road, the John Lewis site was occupied by the Albert Hall, Sheffield’s most imposing concert hall.

This place witnesses the rich, vibrant diversity of life in Victorian industrial towns.  The phrase “cheek-by-jowl” doesn’t begin to express it.  Ruth Harman & John Minnis, Pevnser Architectural Guides:  Sheffield (Yale University Press 2004), pp 98-100, contains a description of Leah’s Yard, pointing out that the eighteen workshops in Leah’s Yard were occupied by a dram-flask manufacturer, hollow-ware and silver buffers, a palette-knife hafter, a steel-fork manufacturer, a silver-ferrule maker, brass and german-silver turners, an electroplate manufacturer and a cutler.  This is how it looked at the end of the twentieth century:  Leah’s Yard Sheffield: 10 photos looking back at famous city centre site at heart of major development | The Star.

Leah’s Yard stood empty and gradually decaying for a couple of decades.  It’s listed Grade II* and has figured on the English Heritage Buildings at Risk register.  From the street it looked not so much tired as exhausted.  Various schemes for sympathetic regeneration of this precious survival came to very little.

Planning permission to demolish the entire street, and much else, to build a new retail quarter was replaced by a redevelopment scheme which was completed in the summer of 2024.

In the meantime, thanks to Sheffield’s admirable e-newspaper, The Tribune, here is a link to drone footage showing the state of progress in the summer of 2023:  The countdown is well and truly on! The frame for the new-build section of Leah’s Yard is up and all around us The Heart of The City is… | Instagram.

Update: This well-written article in the online Sheffield Tribune puts the redevelopment of Leah’s Yard in context as the surrounding improvement scheme comes to fruition: Can Heart of the City bring life back to Sheffield city centre? (sheffieldtribune.co.uk).

Silversmiths

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Former George Ellis (Silversmiths) Ltd, Arundel Street, Sheffield (2010)

Former George Ellis (Silversmiths) Ltd, Arundel Street, Sheffield (2010)

Sheffield’s proud cutlery industry is based on the work of the “little mesters”, small – often one-man – crafts businesses that divided up the multiplicity of tasks involved in creating tableware, kitchenware and cutting tools.  Some of these businesses prospered and grew, sometimes into very large, ultimately world-famous enterprises such as Mappin & Webb [http://www.mappinandwebb.com/content.asp?coid=27].

Around the original town centre there remain tall tenement blocks, often now converted to apartments or offices, which bear the names of long-gone enterprises which imprinted the phrase “Made in Sheffield” as a mark of quality on the best cutlery in the world.  These are areas very like the better known Birmingham Jewellery Quarter.  There is an excellent account of these characteristic Sheffield buildings in Nicola Wray, Bob Hawkins & Colum Giles, One Great Workshop: The buildings of the Sheffield metal trades (English Heritage 2001) [http://www.amazon.co.uk/One-Great-Workshop-Buildings-Conservation/dp/1873592663/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1353486144&sr=8-1].

One such was George Ellis (Silversmiths) Ltd.  George Ellis (1863-1944) began working in 1895 in a little mesters’ shop in John Street, gained his own hallmark from 1912 and formed a limited company in 1932.  The works on Arundel Street – in what was originally an eighteenth-century house – ceased trading around 1971.

Now, after some encouragement from Gordon Ramsay, the building is Silversmiths [http://www.silversmiths-restaurant.com] , a very modern restaurant with an emphasis on regional food, which in Sheffield includes the resolutely local Henderson’s Relish, the work of another kind of Sheffield “little mester”, Henry Henderson.

My friend Paul, who suggested we visit, was present when Gordon Ramsay gave his encouragement.  This apparently involves lots of cameras, lights and theatricals.

We happened upon Pie Night, with Yorkshire pudding served – as it should be – as a starter with Henderson’s Relish gravy.  The pies were excellent, with chips like miniature house-bricks.  And there was gooseberry fool.

The inimitable Yorkshire journalist, Stephen McClarence, had a less favourable experience of Silversmiths, so – much as I admire Steve’s writing – I’ll draw a veil over his review.  You can find it if you know where to look.