Category Archives: Sheffield’s Heritage

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.