Sheffield has a proud and complex heritage, which extends to the surrounding area known from medieval times as Hallamshire.
Because of the settlement’s isolation in a bowl of hills at the confluence of the Rivers Don and Sheaf, Sheffield craftsmen applied the rich coal and ironstone deposits to light steel trades such as cutlery and knives. Only with the arrival of the canal (1820) and the first railways (1838/1845) did heavy steel manufacture – castings, girders, railway hardware, armaments and armour plate – spread across the flat floodplain of the Lower Don Valley.
The world view of the “City of Steel” was based on the quality and volume of its trade from the eighteenth century to the twentieth. It achieved technological pre-eminence through the inventions of (among others) Benjamin Huntsman, Henry Bessemer, Sir Robert Hadfield and Harry Brearley.
It became notorious for grime and pollution as result of the growth of heavy industry: George Orwell called it “the ugliest town in the Old World”, and John Ruskin may have been the first to describe it as an “ugly picture in a beautiful frame”.
Sheffield also has a reputation for religious nonconformity and political radicalism dating back to the seventeenth century. From the four Sheffield clergymen expelled for refusing to sign the Act of Uniformity in 1662, to celebrated nineteenth-century radicals such as James Montgomery (1771-1854), Ebenezer Elliott (1781-1849) and Samuel Holberry (1814-1842), to the leaders of the “People’s Republic of South Yorkshire” in the 1970s and 1980s, Sheffield has been home to dissent and militancy.
Crime has darkened Sheffield’s reputation repeatedly: the Trade Union Outrages of the 1860s, the adventures of the murderer Charlie Peace (1832-1897) and the Gang Wars of the 1920s are notorious episodes in the city’s history. The memory of disasters and tragedies has darkened the lives of those who knew the victims: the Great Sheffield Flood (1864), the Sheffield Blitz (1940) and the Hillsborough Disaster (1989) are remembered though they have relatively few physical memorials.
In sharp contrast, Sheffield has added to the sum of human happiness through art, music, comedy, drama and sport.
The great Victorian art-critic John Ruskin founded his Guild of St George to inspire the creativity of working craftsmen in Sheffield. Local painters have illustrated Sheffield in a variety of styles from the formality of Stanley Royle to the richly evocative folk artists Joe Scarborough and George Cunningham. The work of local sculptors appears unexpectedly, and often unnoticed, around the city: Frank Tory, with his twin sons Alfred and William, and Benjamin Creswick embellished many familiar landmark buildings in the centre. In recent years street art and wall murals, including one in brick, have brightened the streets.
The city has nurtured entertainers and musicians for generations. The organist Reginald Dixon “Mr Blackpool” (1904-1985), the comedians Jimmy Jewel (1909-1995) and his cousin Ben Warriss (1909-1993), Michael Palin (b1943), Marti Caine (1945-1995), Bobby Knutt (1945-2017), Sean Bean (b1959) and Dominic West (b1969) all hail from Sheffield.
In particular, Sheffield has enriched British popular music since the 1960s. Joe Cocker and Jarvis Cocker (unrelated to each other), Def Leppard, Human League, Heaven 17 and the Thompson Twins achieved national prominence with memorable hits and albums. Richard Hawley’s songs frequently reference Sheffield’s heritage past and present, and his 2012 album provided the title and his songs formed the music for the drama Standing at the Sky’s Edge (2019). The Arctic Monkeys continue the tradition of Sheffield-born talent from the start of the 21st century.
In contrast, the city has a number of active orchestras and choirs, and a thriving culture of folk music, including a distinctive repertoire of Christmas carols which are sung in local pubs and clubs.
The TV drama Threads (1984) and the feature-film comedy The Full Monty (1997) are the best-known movie representations of Sheffield. Alan Bennett’s play The History Boys (2004) was nominally set in Sheffield, but the 2006 film adaptation was actually shot in Halifax because the playwright lamented “Sheffield doesn’t look like Sheffield any more”.
The city’s place in the history of sport is marked by the two oldest football clubs in the world, Sheffield FC (1857) and Hallam FC (1860), as well as the broadcasting of the World Snooker Championship from the Crucible Theatre (1977) and the first UK professional ice-hockey team, Sheffield Steelers (1991). Sheffield was the training ground for two outstanding athletes, Lord Sebastian Coe (b1956) and Dame Jessica Ennis-Hill (b1986). The stable of boxers nurtured by Brendan Ingle (1940-2018) – including Herol “Bomber” Graham (b1959), Johnny Nelson (b1967) and Hamed Nazeem (b1974) brought fame to the city.
Sheffield has much to be proud of, despite its characteristic reticence as a town that thought it was a village, until it became a city that thought it was a town. Irrevocably changed by the Blitz, post-war redevelopment and the decline of the steel industry, Sheffield has brightened up out of all recognition, and its energy and acumen are leading through change to a very different future.
These aspects of the history of Sheffield form a panorama of resources from which young people can draw a sense of pride and identity, not only in their history lessons but across the primary and secondary curriculum.
The members of Generation Alpha, born between the early 2010s and the mid-2020s, face more radical change in their lifetimes than any previous generation – including mid-Victorians, late-Victorians and the so-called Baby Boomers. They need and deserve a strand in their education that gives them an understanding of the past on which their exciting present and future are built, and this is enriched by opportunities to relate to the local environment in which they spend their childhood and adolescence.
© Mike Higginbottom