We’ve waited long enough to hear good news about Castlegate, and more importantly the site of old Sheffield Castle.
Sheffield has been successful in its bid to secure £20m of funding for Castlegate through the Government Levelling Up fund.
£15m of this will go towards further archaeological investigation and interpretation of the historic Castle remains for the public to view, quality open space, de-culverting of the River Sheaf and route-ways through the site. Targeted plots on the outer edges of the site will be made ‘developer ready’.
The remaining funding will go towards two other projects – Park Hill Art Space and Harmony Works.
Park Hill Art Space will deliver an arts, cultural and heritage destination at the Park Hill estate and it will aim to be one of the largest contemporary art galleries in the North, complemented by creative workspace and learning facilities, within a six-acre sculpture park.
Harmony Works is a partnership between Sheffield Music Academy and Sheffield Music Hub to create a new fit-for-purpose music academy by refurbishing Grade II listed Canada House on Commercial Street.
Cornwall has its own Sheffield. Photograph: Alex Young
We are looking at our Sheffield namesakes around the globe, starting with the only other Sheffield to exist in the UK.
Sheffield, Cornwall, is a small village, near the village of Paul, about two miles from Newlyn. According to locals, unlike other namesakes, this Sheffield is nothing to do with us.
Not, according to Cornwall Live.
“Cornwall’s got its own Sheffield. The Sheffield up north is known for being a powerhouse of steel production, (had) a premier league football team (with another being named after a day of the week) and a population of just over half a million people.
“Only in Cornwall is Sheffield bigger than Barcelona (near the village of Pelynt). It’s near Penzance and is a series of houses built along the B3315.”
It was first known as Sheffield Terrace in 1841, probably named after the row of houses built by a group of Yorkshire quarrymen who came to work at the nearby quarry and surrounding farms.
“Sheffield has a festering pool in the midst of a foul waste before the doors of the larger village, and a disgusting drain running close to the entrances of the houses in the smaller,” said a Cornish newspaper afterwards.
The principal stone of the district was Land’s End granite, which was extensively mined at Sheffield Quarry until the late 1920s, when it was closed in favour of cheaper imports. At the time, Sheffield Granite was used to build the piers and streets and houses of some of the finest cities in the world.
Sheffield eventually acquired a Chapel and Sunday school. The Teetotal Wesleyan Chapel, built around 1845, was later a Wesleyan School and is now a house.
The most famous inhabitant was Australian-born artist Barbara Tribe (1913-2000) who moved into the old Sunday School after World War Two, and became a lecturer in Modelling and Sculpture at the Penzance School of Art.
By this time, “the summer sunshine, the fine stretch of country, and the sweet sound of children’s voices wafting on the breeze, gave it a fine setting,” said Herbert Richards in The Cornishman in 1947. Not unlike today.
Former Sheffield Granite Quarry, Cornwall. Photograph: Elizabeth Scott
Recent image of the Matilda Tavern. Photograph: Sheffield Star
Once upon a time there was a mill called Cinder Hill Mill, the property of the Wigfull family, powered by water from Porter Brook that flowed into a dam. In 1780, Joshua Wigfull rebuilt Wigfull’s Mill, and it was later enlarged, with a steam engine fixed for driving six pairs of French stones, one pair of grey stones, and a shelling mill.
Most of the flour made at these mills went to Stockport and taken by wagons and pack-saddle to Middleton. There they were met by a team of relay teams and vehicles and carried forward. The mill was demolished in 1862 and stood in or near the present Leadmill Road.
At the side of the mill were fields rented by a Doctor Brown from the Duke of Norfolk, and the district became known as Doctor’s Fields.
In the late 18th century, the Duke of Norfolk set about his ambitious plan to develop this neighbourhood, alongside Alsop Fields, into a fashionable residential district. James Paine drew up a masterplan with a proposed gridwork of streets, the key ones being Union Street, Norfolk Street, Eyre Street, Arundel Street, Howard Street, Charles Street, Furnival Street, and Duke Street.
Duke Street stretched between Union Street and Porter Brook, and when it was extended towards Doctor’s Fields the new portion from Arundel Street onwards became known as Matilda Street, named after William the Conqueror’s wife, Queen Matilda of Flanders.
By 1838 nine newly-erected houses had been constructed, one of them a large public-house, a coaching inn beside Porter Brook, with an archway that led to a stable yard behind, and this was called the Matilda Tavern.
The masterplan faltered, and instead of posh houses for the wealthy, the area was instead utilised for industry. By the 1870s, the upper portion of the road, Duke Street, was also renamed Matilda Street to avoid confusion with the street of the same name at Park.
The Matilda Tavern thrived and apart from serving ale, it was a place where Thomas Badger, coroner for the Upper Division of the Wapentake of Strafforth and Tickhill, held inquests on dead bodies, many of whom had drowned in Porter Brook or in the unprotected portion of the Wigfull Mill dam.
And so, the Matilda Tavern thrived, and when coach and horses disappeared, it served the hundreds of thousands of workers that worked in nearby factories. Eventually, industry disappeared, and its fortunes waned.
In 1999, its exterior was used in an ITV series called Four Fathers, starring Tony Doyle and Neil Dudgeon, its north of England setting somewhat gloomy, but its characters gainfully employed with humour amid the drama.
However, six years later, in 2005, the Matilda Tavern closed for good, its windows boarded-up, and the interiors left to rot.
Several new residential developments in the area, notably the apartments on the corner of Matilda Street and Arundel Street, and the apartments along Fornham Street, have brought students to the area.
In 2007, developers were given permission to alter and extend the old pub and erect a new building behind for student accommodation and ground floor business space. All these years later, conversion of the upper floors have been completed and work on the new student accommodation is under way and due to be finished in spring 2022.
However, in a new planning application, architects Wireframe Studio, says “The proposal is to now change the ground floor and basement of the building from business use back to its original use as a drinking establishment with the paved area along the river as an external terrace.”
The golden days might have disappeared, its smoky rooms and beer-stained carpets likely replaced with modern interiors, but at least the Matilda Tavern may live-on.
Reading a biography of Edgar Wallace is an exhausting experience. He was the author of over 170 books, translated into more than thirty languages. More films were made from his books than any other twentieth-century writer, and in the 1920s a quarter of all books read in England were written by him.
He was said to sleep just a few hours every night. The rest of the time was spent dictating novels, plays (many of which were performed at Sheffield’s Theatre Royal and Lyceum), newspaper articles, and racing tips. His secretaries typed out finished copy and sent them off to publishers.
Edgar Wallace, the illegitimate son of a travelling actress, rose from poverty in Victorian England to become the most popular author in the world and a global celebrity of his age. He scooped the signing of the Boer War peace treaty when working as a war correspondent, before achieving success as a film director and playwright. At the height of his success, he was earning a vast fortune, but the money went out as fast as it came in. Famous for his thrillers, with their fantastic plots, in many ways Wallace did not write his most exciting story: he lived it.
Edgar Wallace. “He knew wealth & poverty, yet had walked with kings and kept his bearing. Of his talents he gave lavishly to authorship – but to Fleet Street he gave his heart.”
In the 1930s, Joseph P. Lamb, the Sheffield city librarian, analysed borrowing trends and decided that people wanted the same type of books – they ‘read along mass lines,’ he once said, and people were irritated when ‘their’ books were out on loan. As a result of this, books by populist authors like Edgar Wallace were purchased in fifties of each title.
In 1931, Edgar Wallace published ‘The Devil Man,’ with definitive links to Sheffield.
The book focused on Sheffield’s favourite criminal Charles Peace. According to the Sheffield Daily Independent it held the reader throughout. ‘The bad little man is as fascinating in Mr Wallace’s pages as he was supposed to be to women during his lifetime.’
“He was a queer, incongruous figure of a man. His height could not have been more than five feet; the big, dark, deep-set eyes were the one pleasant feature in a face which was utterly repulsive. They were the eyes of an intelligent animal. The forehead was grotesquely high, running in furrows almost to where at the crown of his head, a mop of grey hair rolled back. The unshaven cheeks were cadaverous, deeply lined and hollow. He wore home-knitted mittens, and in one hand clutched an ancient violin case.”
The Devil Man: The Life and Death of Charles Peace (1931)
Wallace did not mix fiction with fact, ‘he rather built an additional storey of fiction on the solid house of fact.’
Wallace raked Peace’s ugly career as it stood – his friendship with the flashy Mrs Dyson and the subsequent murder of her husband – and superimposed a strange plot regarding the secret of a new steel process – presumably stainless.
Dyson had in his possession a bottle containing some all-important crystals, and Peace is offered a large sum of money by foreigners living in Sheffield if he will steal the bottle.
This, according to Wallace, was his errand on that terrible night in Banner Cross in November 1876 when Peace shot Dyson, a former neighbour at Darnall.
Peace quarrelled with Mrs Dyson, shot her husband, secured the bottle, and then handed it to a confederate, which was the last he ever saw of it. It was in connection with this murder that, according to Wallace, Peace had previously gone to Manchester to commit a burglary and murdered a policeman.
Charles Peace (1832-1879) Photograph: Picture Sheffield
‘The atmosphere of Sheffield in the ‘70s is deftly caught,’ said the Sheffield Daily Independent. ‘And although one feels in this book as one does in other Wallace novels – that toward the end the author has got a little bored with his subject: the story is brilliantly told.’
Wallace stated that it had taken him four years to collect the facts for the story, four months to construct the book, and four days to write it.
According to author Neil Clark, who penned ‘Stranger Than Fiction – The Life of Edgar Wallace’, ‘Sir Patrick Hastings was a guest during the weekend Wallace wrote the 70,000-word novel in just sixty hours. Hastings had difficulty in sleeping on the Friday night, and had gone to Wallace’s study where he found him dictating. He sat and watched him for two hours and was enthralled by the way Wallace worked. By nine o’clock on Monday morning, Wallace had completed his task, which earned him £4,000 in serial rights alone. He then went to bed for two days to make up for the sleep he had missed.’
A year after the novel was published, Edgar Wallace went to Hollywood to work on the RKO ‘gorilla picture’ King Kong, but his gruelling lifestyle finally caught up with him, and he died of diabetes and double pneumonia in February 1932.
In his will it was revealed that he had debts of £140,000 and almost all his possessions had to be sold. However, within two years, the royalties from Wallace’s work had cleared all the debts.
Sources: Stranger Than Fiction – The Life od Edgar Wallace, The Man Who Created King Kong, by Neil Clark (2014) and Val Hewson at The Auden Generation and After conference, Sheffield Hallam University, 17 June 2016.
The Germans made a mess of High Street during World War Two, we made a mess of it afterwards, and there is an irony that the first seeds of future regeneration might be coming in the shape of a German doner kebab.
The upmarket German Doner Kebab is opening at Telegraph House in space previously occupied by Santander. The former headquarters of the Telegraph and Star were built between 1913 and 1916 by Sheffield architects Gibbs, Flockton & Teather, and constructed by George Longden & Son.
Photograph: Sheffield Star
German Doner Kebab opened its first store in Berlin in 1989, and while we might turn our noses up at a cheap takeaway favourite, these promise to be different. According to its website, the kebabs use beef and meats imported from Germany, enhancing them with ‘secret sauces’ and locally-produced vegetables in a special bread.
The doner kebab was a Turkish creation, but its popularity came from Germany. More than 17 million are now sold throughout the country. In Berlin, there are over 1,000 kebab eateries and they even outsell the city’s most famous snack, the Currywurst.
In the late 1950s, thousands of Turkish workers made their way to West Germany to support a depleted workforce. As the country’s economic fortunes changed in the 1960s, many Turks sought alternative employment in hospitality.
Three of these Turkish workers would have their names intrinsically linked with the introduction of the Döner Kebab.Kadir Nurman opened a small eatery at the Zoologischer Garten train station, Mehmet Aygün claims to have introduced the kebab at his parents Turkish restaurant in 1971, while Nevzat Salim opened a snack stand in Reutlingen – near Stuttgart – back in 1969.
As with any culinary creation, sourcing its actual origin is always problematic – like most things, food and recipes evolve, but now the German doner will finally find its way to Sheffield.
A modern-day view of Boots on High Street, Sheffield
Boots might be a Nottingham company, but Sheffield has played an important part in its long history. Established in 1849 by John Boot, it was his son Jesse who built the company into a household name with stores all over the world. Its first chemist branch outside Nottingham was at 17 Spital Hill, in 1884, followed by branches at Snig Hill, West Street, South Street (The Moor), Attercliffe, London Road, Netherthorpe, Abbeydale, and Shalesmoor.
Sheffield was firmly in Jesse Boots’ sights and for a brief time, in the early 1890s, he lived here with his wife Florence. Its most prominent branch opened in May 1898 at 6 High Street, on land owned by John Walsh (of department store fame) between the Fosters Building (erected 1896) and the auctioneers Nicholson, Greaves, Barber and Hastings (now Café Nero). All were constructed as part of High Street widening plans.
The High Street branch opened in 1898 and the illustration shows what the original building looked like. Photograph: British Newspaper Archive
Boots opened its narrow shop alongside the Thatched House Restaurant, taking advantage of heavy footfall between High Street and Fargate. On 8 October 1918, a Government Information Bureau opened in-store. The Bureaux had been established by the government earlier in the year to provide information to the public on matters relating to the First World War; national war aims, national services, war savings, food, labour, and so on. This was one of just twenty such bureau, each located in a prime Boots store, and it required only two square yards of space for its small, pre-fabricated stand.
Boots refitted its store in 1922, but when the Thatched House Restaurant came on the market in 1929 it bought the property and announced plans to extend next door. The plans were radical and involved demolition of both properties, only 33 years after they had been constructed.
The new enlarged building was designed by Percy J. Bartlett, the Boots’ architect, and was constructed by Thomas Wilkinson and Sons, Olive Grove Works, Sheffield.
“Cheap drugs would be dear if they were cheap and nasty. Nasty to the palate many drugs are bound to be; but worse is the nastiness of bad quality.” – Jesse Boot
The handsome elevation was based on the Renaissance style, the modern shop front, the black and silver canopy, the green slates surmounting the lower story, and the blue-green of the windows above, formed a modern building combined with traditional beauty.
It was constructed in Stoke Hall stone, provided by Percy J. Turner from their own quarries at Grindleford. Warm yellow in colour, it claimed to be impervious to the effects of acids in smoke-laden atmospheres.
The shop front was a tribute to Sheffield’s staple industry, completed in Firth Brown ‘Staybrite’ steel, which was as much attractive to the eye as the deeply recessed entrance, and non-slip paving. The steel was used for framing the windows and main entrance doors, and the Boots sign was cast in Staybrite and mounted with neon lights.
The glass and iron canopy decorated in black and silver was capable of illumination at night, and replaced old-fashioned shop blinds, to provide permanent protection against rain.
Photographs: Walgreens Boots Alliance
The interior fittings were chiefly light mahogany, the floors laid in ceramic mosaic on top of ‘bison’ concrete flooring, and heating was generated by rooftop pipes to provide even temperature throughout its three sales floors.
The ground floor was set aside for the principal business of chemist and toiletries. A surgical department, staffed by fully trained nurses, provided a private fitting room and a dispensary.
Photograph: Walgreens Boots Alliance
A staircase in the centre of the showroom led to the basement, where travelling goods, stationary, books, pictures and artists’ materials were displayed. The first floor contained the ‘Booklovers’ Library’ decorated in blue and green, and a fascinating exhibition of artistic gifts, silver, and fancy merchandise. All three floors were served by a staircase and two lifts.
Electric lighting in the store was designed by Harcourts, of Birmingham, based on original suggestions of Percy J. Bartlett. The fittings were arranged to take four one hundred watt Cosmos lamps, with a combination of four crystal etched glass cylinders.
Photograph: Walgreens Boots Alliance
It opened in October 1931, and the address became 4-6 High Street. Two years later a Bargain Basement opened, bringing a modern style of retailing to the store. Further alterations were made in 1936 and it was later extended into the adjacent Foster’s Building.
Photographs: Walgreens Boots Alliance
Those of a certain generation will remember that the basement eventually opened out into a subway that stretched across High Street, and which was eventually lost when Supertram works started.
Sadly, the frontage we see today is the result of the generic modernisation of the retail sector, but remember it only disguises the past.
Boots is now part of the Retail Pharmacy International Division of Walgreens Boots Alliance, Inc.
Percy J. Bartlett, the Boots’ architect, on his retirement. Photograph: Walgreens Boots Alliance
Shop windows as they used to be. Photograph: Walgreens Boots Alliance
Behind the Town Hall, on Norfolk Street, is a single doorway with the words ‘Disinfectants’ carved into the lintel above. It appears to originate from 1897, the year that Sheffield’s new Town Hall opened, and where ratepayers were able to buy disinfectant for their homes.
Disease was a worry for our Victorian ancestors and the city was still recovering from outbreaks of smallpox, scarlet fever, measles, whooping cough, and puerperal fever. In 1896, Sheffield’s population was 347,278 and quickly expanding into Walkley, Attercliffe and Heeley. In that year, 6,732 people died, many from disease, although the trend was decreasing. Astonishingly, 392 people had died from diarrhoea.
Medical science was concerned with tracking disease to its source with a view to prevention and was no longer content to repair the ravages of disease which might have been prevented.
In a time when preventative vaccines were still in their infancy, disinfectant was used to spearhead the fight against zymotic diseases. Where disease was evident in the home it was the use of carbolic acid powder and chloride of lime that allowed walls to be washed while articles were removed and burned.
One of the concerns was that if people were ill with infection, to make sure that they didn’t pass it on, cleaning and disinfecting, both where they lived, and the things that they owned and had contact with, was a way of eradicating germs
Sheffield had a disinfecting station at Plum Lane where infected people and their possessions would enter the station from one side, move through the process of steam disinfection and exit out the other side. There were also metal hoppers in which people would have placed their infested clothes before taking a sulphur bath to treat their condition.
These sorts of places were common across the country and were a very important part of how Victorian and Edwardian local authorities responded to outbreaks. And when outbreaks did occur, high-occupancy slum housing meant it spread quickly. In 1899, a typhoid outbreak at Brightside speedily infected over 100 people within a half mile radius.
Carbolic acid remained one of the most popular disinfectants, sold in liquid and powdered form at pharmacist’s shops, but also pre-mixed with soap. But there was also a leading brand of disinfectant, made right here in Sheffield, and this was Izal, a supplier to the British army, and the only liquid disinfectant used on troops in the Boer War. It was thought to have been beneficial for the treatment of typhoid and diarrhoea when administered internally.
In the 1930s, as infectious diseases became less virulent and more treatable thanks to a combination of vaccines and antibiotics, the use of disinfectants declined, but manufacturing processes made it more widely available to the population.
Restoration work this century revealed that stone for the Town Hall clock tower came from a long-disused quarry at Walkley. Photograph: DJP/2021
Sheffield’s third Town Hall was designed by Edward William Mountford, a London architect, and opened in 1897. Its clock and tower, the face of our city, stands at the north-east corner, over 100ft high and topped with a statue of Vulcan, the Roman god of fire and metalworking.
The tower is built on a bed of concrete, 30ft square, and 25ft thick; the concrete itself resting on solid rock. At ground level the walls are about five feet thick, and when it was built the strong room for the City Accountant was located here. The dome and spire at the top of the tower are covered with copper.
It was always thought that the tower was made of ‘Stoke’ stone from Stoke Hall Quarry, near Grindleford, but restoration work in 2017 revealed that it was from a long-disused quarry at Walkley.
The Town Hall clock was the work of William Potts and Sons, Leeds, clock makers to Queen Victoria, and was constructed to strike the quarters and hours on heavy bells. However, Sheffield Corporation waited for somebody to show their public spirit and provide the bells – something that never happened – and without it the striking parts of the clock were useless.
The frame of the clock was in one solid casing, planed perfectly flat on the top and bottom surfaces. It rested upon iron girders, supported by stone corbels built into the tower wall, and provided a rigid foundation for good time-keeping.
The large main wheels for the hour and quarter parts were 22 inches and 20 inches in diameter, respectively. The hour main wheel had ten steel cams attached for lifting the hammer to strike the large bell, with the quarter wheel having suitable cams in readiness for the ‘phantom’ bells. The large gong wheel was 20 inches in diameter.
The workings of the Town Hall clock. Seen here in the 1980s. Photograph: Picture Sheffield
There was special arrangement for accurately discharging both the hour and quarter parts, with set dials showing both seconds and minutes, and was known as the double three-legged gravity, the invention of Edmund Beckett, 1st Baron Grimthorpe, the man behind Big Ben’s clock, with the two seconds pendulum compensated for differences of temperature and heavy cylindrical bob.
There were four dials, each 8ft, 6 inches in diameter, formed of skeleton iron castings filled in with opal glass, originally illuminated at night by gas, with suitable reflectors behind. The hands were made of stout copper, counterpoised inside, and the motion wheels were made of hard brass, the teeth cut out of it. The bevel work was carried by light iron girders placed across the clock room, and the whole clock was enclosed in a neat wooden case to keep it clean.
The four faces of Sheffield Town Hall’s clocks. Work started in 1890 and wasn’t completed until 1897. Photograph: Rob Huntley
It was not until 2002 that the Town Hall got bells – but nothing as elaborate as once intended. The chimes that now ring out across the city centre comes from an electronic sound-system providing hourly strikes and Westminster-style quarter chimes.
The clock tower was exposed to Sheffield’s pollution and weather for well over a hundred years and had to be restored at a cost of £86,000 in 2017. The original ironwork which had corroded within the structure was exposed and treated and indent repairs were conducted to the ornate carved capitals. Other masonry was repaired and repointed, as necessary. In addition, new rainwater pipes, asphalt floors and gutters were installed. Suitable fine sandstone providing a good match with the original stone was sourced from local suppliers based in Chesterfield.
The clock tower stands at the north corner of the Town Hall, set back slightly in deference to the main façade. This photograph from contractor Maysand shows restoration work in 2017
Sheffield Corporation could not decide whether or not to install a four-ton bell at a cost of £400 before the building of the tower was completed. It was said that if the bell were not put in, but it was decided to put it in later, a great deal money would have to be spent and serious damage done to the tower.Photograph: Picture Sheffield
Tuffnells adopted its slogan – The Big Green Parcel Machine – in 1985. Photograph: Tuffnells
Which Sheffield company operates from a network of 34 depots, with a head office in the city, and serves about 4,000 businesses?
This is a company founded in 1914 by Harold James Tuffnell (1886-1963) with a horse and a cart he bought for £100. His surname is the giveaway, and today Tuffnells is a nationwide parcels carrier.
Harold James Tuffnell was once a groom to Charles Crookes, a steel manufacturer of East Cliffe House, East Bank Road. He died at the Royal Hospital in 1963. Photograph: Tuffnells
By the 1920s, Harold Tuffnell was operating on Langdon Street as a motor haulage contractor and coal merchant, living at 261 Pearl Street. By 1936, H.J. Tuffnell Ltd, carriers, were on Mary Street, with Harold living at 149 Folds Lane
By 1951, H.J. Tuffnell operated seven vehicles with a livery of maroon and cream, but two years later was sold to Mr E.J. Shaw, who had bought into removal company Caudles (established in the 1890s by William Caudle as a coal merchant, furniture remover, and haulier).
The company moved to Woodbourn Road, and subsequently to Shepcote Lane in the late 1960s.
Tuffnells new Shepcote Lane distribution centre in 1968. Photograph: Picture Sheffield
In 1971, Tuffnells was sold to TDG (Transport Development Group), a company founded in 1922 as The General Lighterage Co, and which eventually was swallowed up by Nobert Dentressangle and XPO Logistics. Under TDG, Tuffnells expanded and by the 1980s operated out of fifteen depots nationwide.
It changed its name to Tuffnells Parcels Express in 1985, and with a fleet of two hundred vehicles, adopted the slogan, The Big Green Parcel Machine.
Tuffnells was subject to a £33m management buyout in 2005 and turnover exceeded £100m for the first time. It came to the attention of the Connect Group, another company with a long history – originally known as W.H. Smith News and renamed Smiths News in 2006 from the demerger of W.H. Smith. It became the Connect Group before reverting to Smiths News again.
Connect paid £100m for Tuffnells in its centenary year, later moving its main distribution centre to Europa Close and its head office to the former Sheffield City Council Offices on Carbrook Hall Road.
The takeover was not without its problems and subject to a run of poor performance, (“a drag on profitability and cash”), Connect had considered closing it, before off-loading the company (and its 1,200 green trucks) to investment vehicle Palm Bidco for £15m in July 2020, effectively returning the company back into private hands once again.
Still going strong, despite plans by the Connect Group to close the business in 2019. Photograph: Tuffnells
Measuring 20,000 square foot and sitting on a four-acre site, the Europa Close site is home to 41 vehicles, 51 loading bays and 139 employees. Photograph: AKV Group
Pinstone Chambers. Elegant, its exterior untouched, and one of the few buildings that doesn’t form part of the Heart of the City II development. Photograph: Google.
Heart of the City II is altering the way our city centre looks. We must go back to Victorian times to see anything resembling the magnitude of this change. Before then, the area around Pinstone Street was a region of dirty, narrow, streets and alleys that led to nowhere. The poor were abundant, and then the jennel known as Pinstone Street was replaced by a broad thoroughfare, and the people who lived under the shadow of St. Paul’s dome (now Peace Gardens) migrated southward. With it came shops and offices that are no longer suitable for the 21st century… and now we are preserving the look, but removing the myriad of old corridors, staircases, and rooms behind.
Once completed, almost the whole of the west side of Pinstone Street will have been touched by redevelopment… and that is quite a remarkable achievement.
One building will remain, oblivious to the change around it, and one that rarely gets a mention.
Few people realise that the entrance to Pinstone Chambers once led to the remarkable building behind.
For all to see. This stone was laid by William Bramwell Booth, the Salvation Army’s Chief of Staff. It can be seen to the right of the modern-day entrance. Photograph: DJP/2021
We can trace Pinstone Chambers (Nos. 44-62 Pinstone Street), at its corner with Cross Burgess Street, back to 1891, when the Salvation Army ‘planted the flag’ on a piece of land bought from Sheffield Corporation. A year later, a ceremony took place to turn the first sod. ‘The waste piece of ground has been as free of turf as a billiard ball is of hair, it was hard to see where the sod would be found.’
The foundation stones were laid in September 1892, and formed part of an inner wall, the inscriptions on them visible in the entrance hall by which the Sheffield Citadel behind was approached from Pinstone Street. By this, we know that this building was steadfastly linked with the Salvation Army’s place of worship, one that survives in disgraceful neglect, and awaits its own course of redevelopment.
The architect was William Gillbee Scott (1857-1930), who designed the Gower Street Memorial Chapel (now the Chinese Church in London), and the London and Provincial Bank in Enfield.
The building is curved on plan, has five storeys, and has seven bays at the east return and one along Cross Burgess Street to the south. The building is Classical in style and has red brick elevations with contrasting sandstone dressings. Architectural features include ground floor shopfronts, mullioned fenestrations, casement windows and rusticated pilasters between bays.
The building was erected by Messrs. Thomas Fish and Son, Nottingham, and comprised accommodation on the top floor, offices beneath, and six large shops on Pinstone Street. Painting and decoration were by Thomas Toon, of Nottingham.
The land cost £7,812, and the building work over £16,000, the shops and offices used to bring in considerable income for the Salvation Army.
It was opened by Commissioner Thomas Henry Howard, on 27 January 1894.
This photograph in the Picture Sheffield collection shows the construction of the Citadel Building between 1892-1894. St. Paul’s Church, on the right, stood where the Peace Gardens are now. Photograph: Picture Sheffield.
The carved initials of the Salvation Army above the main entrance. Photograph: DJP/2021
The main entrance to the Citadel was from Pinstone Street, flanked by the row of shops. The visitor passed along a vestibule lit by gas in ruby globes. The walls were decorated in green sage, with a deep maroon dado, and the floor was paved in mosaic style. Inserted into the wall on the right were the dozen stones, laid when the building commenced, with the names of those who undertook that duty.
While the temperance rooms at the Citadel are decisively linked with the Salvation Army, the Citadel Building (as it became known) was better known for its commercial activities. Soon after it opened it was occupied by the Wentworth Café and Hotel, moving here from Holly Street, a socialist meeting place famously linked with Edward Carpenter. That association ended in 1922 when the whole of the premises was leased by Stewart and Stewart, the well-known tailors, who extended from next door.
The Wentworth Cafe and Hotel occupied most of the building from about 1898 to 1922. The entrance to the Salvation Army Citadel can be seen centre-left. Photograph: Picture Sheffield.
One of the original occupants. This newspaper advertisement from 1898 is for Stewart and Stewart who later leased the whole of the ground floor. Photograph: British Newspaper Archive.
The Sheffield Citadel was built at the same time as Pinstone Chambers. Despite the contrasting styles, the two buildings were connected by a corridor leading from its main entrace on Pinstone Street. Photograph: Sheffield Star.
Afterwards, while shops frequently changed hands, the upper floors were used as offices until the interiors of Pinstone Chambers were completely remodelled for city living accommodation.
The Salvation Army moved out of the Citadel in 1999, the crumbling shell still attached to Pinstone Chambers, but the old main entrance and corridor to it long since blocked-off.
Is the ‘foundation stone’ wall still visible in the old vestibule? What survives of the Victorian floor mosaic? Is there any evidence of the sage green and deep maroon decoration?
Probably not.
With its curved Queen Anne facade, Pinstone Chambers remains one of Sheffield’s most attractive buildings. Photograph: Google.
Pinstone Chambers. The National Market Traders Federation was founded at the Wentworth Café in 1899. Photograph: DJP/2021)
Pinstone Chambers. The carved initials of the Salvation Army can be seen above the entrance. Photograph: DJP/2021
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