Queen Victoria reckoned that Edward, the playboy Prince of Wales, would not make a good King. She frowned upon his antics – drinking, gambling, horse-racing, shooting and passionate attachments – but she was quite wrong.
However, she might have been forgiven for believing this. On more than one occasion Edward proved an embarrassment, something not known to common folk, but whispered about in higher circles.
In a separate post, we discovered that Edward, as Prince of Wales, paid a discreet visit to Tapton Court, at Ranmoor, to meet his old friend, Henry Steel, a man who made his fortune as a bookmaker. Now, we have another story where Edward made a clandestine journey into Sheffield.
“In a little oak room reached by a winding staircase in an old Sheffield inn there used to sit a caped and overcoated figure playing cards or talking to two or three friends.
“The story goes that this striking figure was King Edward VII, then Prince of Wales, and the inn was the Shades Vaults in Hartshead.
“People well remembered His Majesty walking up the narrow passage along Hartshead and going straight into the Shades Vaults and up to a little oak room.”
Photograph by Picture Sheffield
The story goes that King Edward was dressed in an old ulster overcoat, an old hat, and old boots. In the little room, it is said, he used to meet his good friend Henry Steel, of Tapton Court, former bookmaker and one of the founders of Steel, Peech and Tozer, steel manufacturers.
The place was romantic enough. The room in which he was supposed to have sat with Henry Steel, a man of his day, was a small and secluded old-world corner in which anyone travelling incognito could sit quietly and enjoy a rest far away from the worries and cares of the outer world.
The little room at Shades Vaults by The British Newspaper Archive
The story emerged in 1932, long after the deaths of those involved – Edward died in 1910, and Henry passed away five years later – but it was a tale passed down by generations.
Shades Vaults has long gone, destroyed by German bombers during World War Two, and the narrow passage was Watson’s Walk that ran from Angel Street into Hartshead. It was named after a well-known local family that kept several public houses in the town centre and, despite being flattened during the Blitz, is still the name attached to the covered walkway that goes underneath Argos into Hartshead Square.
The Shades dated to the late 1790s, was kept in 1805 by Sam Turner, known as ‘Gin Sam’, and was commonly known as T’oil in T’wall.
The winning entry for the Sheffield Memorial Hall. Photograph by Archiseek
A building familiar to us all, the Sheffield City Hall, on Barker’s Pool, but take a closer look at these images.
The first is the winning entry by architect Emanuel Vincent Harris in a competition held in 1920, to design a new memorial hall, in recognition of those that lost their lives during World War One.
Sheffield had long recognised the need for a large hall for concerts, meetings, and lectures, and considered buying the Albert Hall on the site of what is now John Lewis. The proposal was rejected in favour of a new building.
The competition was judged by Sir Aston Webb (who designed the principal façade of Buckingham Palace and the main building of the Victoria and Albert Museum) and Frederick Ernest Pearce Edwards, city architect.
“An austere appearance well suited for a memorial hall with the best modern thought in architecture expressed in its compact yet comprehensive outlines.”
The original design of the memorial hall tried to avoid flights of steps, but the fall of the land in Barker’s Pool prevented it. It was designed to seat 3,500 with a smaller hall at the back to be added later if desired.
The second image is the runner-up in the competition, designed by James Black Fulton, a circular-shaped big hall with external dome and glazed shelters to the side doorways and vestibule.
James Black Fulton’s runner-up design. Photograph by Archiseek
Although the winner of the competition was announced in 1920 construction was repeatedly delayed by the fragile state of public finances during the Depression.
The interruption resulted in modifications to Harris’s original design, including a revision from 1924 that made greater use of steps outside, the addition of decorative flagpoles either side of the frontage, as well as long-running arguments as to what the building should be called.
You will see from the 1924 drawing, below, that ‘Sheffield Memorial Hall’ is engraved above the colonnade, but they were still squabbling by the time the foundation stone was eventually laid in 1929.
Photograph by The British Newspaper Archive
When it opened in September 1932, with a reduced capacity of 2,300, Harris’s building was called Sheffield City Hall, the smaller hall at the back recognised as the Memorial Hall.
The original budget was fixed at £200,000 in 1920. However, by the time it opened the final cost was £443,300… about £31.1 million today.
In 2000, at the point of the internet boom, somebody at Sheffield City Council’s Archives and Local Studies department had the foresight to start digitalising its vast collections.
Photograph by Picture Sheffield
Picture Sheffield turned out to be one of the first digital resource libraries in the UK, and as it celebrates its twentieth anniversary, it remains one of the country’s best photographic anthologies.
The service collects and preserves original records and printed material relating to Sheffield and its surrounding area, dating from the 12th century to the present.
Photograph by Picture Sheffield
In these days of lockdown, Picture Sheffield can provide hours of endless free entertainment and shows us how things used to look, how our ancestors appeared and how the city has evolved.
For historians, it is a valuable point of reference, and on a personal level, I have spent ages examining photographs of buildings and streets to check bygone information.
Photograph by Picture Sheffield
It is estimated there are well over 60,000 local images available to view, boosted by last year’s acquisition of over 2,000 images from the Tim Hale Photographic Collection, bought with help of public donations (£2,500 bestowed within days) and a £5,000 grant from the J.G. Graves Charitable Trust.
Photograph by Picture Sheffield
Picture Sheffield is a non-profit making service and income received from picture sales and donations is used to cover the cost of managing and developing the service which includes adding over 100 extra images a month.
When Sugworth Hall, at Bradfield Dale, was on the market last year, it was offered in the region of £1.5million. Not a bad price considering the Grade II listed country house is in beautiful Sheffield countryside, and it has a long history.
According to experts, this was once a farmhouse dating to about 1535, later listed in the will and testament of Robert Hawksworth in the 1560s. Passing down the family it eventually belonged to the Gould family and was extended in the late 19th century.
By this time, Sugworth Hall was in the possession of Charles Henry Firth, also of Riverdale House at Ranmoor, son of Thomas Firth, a steel manufacturer, whose company would eventually become Firth Brown. After he died in 1892, the house passed to his widow and eventually put up to let as a substantial family residence or shooting box.
Photograph by Picture Sheffield
It was subsequently bought by Philip Henry Ashbury of Mushroom Lane, managing director of Philip Ashbury and Sons, Bowling Green Street, silver and electro-platers, who used it as a “delightful summer residence” until his death in 1909.
It was inherited by his son George W. Ashbury, a man who soon made headlines by accusing two of his servants of stealing beds, bedding and towels and was promptly sued for libel, his accusations costing him £15 in damages.
Photograph by Picture Sheffield
The house was briefly occupied by Alfred Percy Hill, of the firm of J and P Hill, engineers, and later Russian Consul for Sheffield, and by the early 1920s it was owned by Charles Boot (1874-1945), son of Henry Boot, founder of the famous Sheffield construction firm, and notable for creating Pinewood Studios.
Charles Boot
It was Charles Boot who made significant alterations and extensions to the house, with a tower and battlements, probably the work of architect Emmanuel Vincent Harris, the man who designed Sheffield City Hall.
The work is said to have taken place around 1930, about the time Vincent Harris was working on Sheffield’s new civic building, but based on the architect’s workload, it seems more likely the alterations were made between 1926-1927.
Photograph by Blenheim Park Estates
Boot’s wife, the splendidly named Bertha Boot, died at Sugworth Hall after a long illness in 1926, giving rise to speculation that an isolated tower, Boot’s Folly, built in 1927, about 330 yards to the north, was constructed so that he could see the graveyard at High Bradfield where she was buried.
Another story suggests that Boot’s Folly was built to provide work for Sugworth Hall’s workmen during the Depression, but more likely it was built as an observation tower for Boot and his guests to view surrounding countryside.
Whatever the reason, Charles Boot remarried five months later, to Kate Hebb, at St Peter’s Church in London.
Photograph by Brian Mosley
Charles Boot bought Thornbridge Hall, near Bakewell, in 1930, declaring that this would be his main residence, and that Sugworth Hall would be maintained as a shooting box instead.
By 1934, Boot had sold Sugworth Hall to Brevet-Colonel William Tozer, of the Hallamshire Battalion of the York and Lancaster Regiment, the grandson of Edward Tozer, one of the founders of Steel, Peech and Tozer, steel manufacturers.
Photograph of William Tozer by Picture Sheffield
Having lived for fifteen years at Grange Cliff, Ecclesall, Tozer became Master Cutler in 1936, the ceremony highlighted by Anthony Eden, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, and later Prime Minister, coming to stay at Sugworth Hall.
The Tozer’s left Sheffield for Buckinghamshire in 1939 and since then Sugworth Hall has survived quietly in Bradfield Dale.
Boot’s Folly has fared less well. The 45 feet high tower, 20 feet square, once had a furnished wooden panelled room at the top, connected by a spiral staircase, but has sadly become ruinous over time. (The staircase allegedly removed after a cow ascended the steps and became stuck).
In 1894, The Sketch magazine said that when the romance of journalism was written a very large chapter would have to be devoted to Sir William Christopher Leng, editor and proprietor of the Sheffield Daily Telegraph. “Although there are probably thousands who have never heard his name.”
William Leng was born in Hull in 1825 and started out as a wholesale chemist. He contributed anonymously to local newspapers in Hull – overloading on steamers, the growth of ultramodernism among British Catholics, and parodies in prose and verse on leading writers of the day. He also wrote for the Hull Free Press, featuring sketches of local celebrities, portraying their virtues, foibles, failings, and distinguishing features.
His brother, John (later Sir John Leng, proprietor of the Dundee Advertiser) entered journalism and persuaded William to join his newspaper as leader writer and reviewer.
In 1864, aged 39, William entered partnership with Frederick Clifford and purchased the Sheffield Daily Telegraph, the first provincial daily newspaper, becoming its editor and changing its fortunes.
“He brought with him to Sheffield all the Imperialistic traditions of his father, all the anti-slavery feeling inherited from his mother, all his own independence of thought, all his old determinations to make his writings reflect his own beliefs, all that manly courage which led him to defy consequences if only he were faithful to the truth as it seemed to him.”
Photograph by Vanity Fair
During his time as editor, he waged war on radicalism, slum housing, American Confederate sympathisers, on the tyranny of trade unionism, and supported Turkey in their conflict with Russia. His association with Samuel Plimsoll was able to revolutionise safety for sailors and prevent overloading on ships.
When he came to Sheffield, Conservatism was at its lowest ebb, but by his writings, he managed to change working class views and by the end of his tenure they held four out of five seats on the council.
At the time, Sheffield was the centre of British trade union revolt, the stronghold of William Broadhead, secretary of the Sawgrinders’ Union, and instigator of murderous trade outrages which paralysed British commerce. If a manufacturer quarrelled with his workmen, Broadhead issued an instruction, and men went forth to destroy his machinery and burn down his factory.
William Leng took up against Broadhead, who sneered at him, having already killed one Sheffield newspaper and confident he could annihilate another. However, Broadhead was unprepared for the broadside that the Sheffield Telegraph hurled at him.
Every day William tossed his journalistic javelins into Broadhead’s camp, and every day was threatened for his boldness. He wrote his leaders with a pistol by his side and walked through the streets at night with his finger on the trigger of a revolver. For weeks he carried his life in his hands.
Wm Broadhead-Picture Sheffield
The ruthless arbiters of Labour had resolved to crush Broadhead, and when a Royal Commission was obtained William had to sit in open court between two policemen for fear that he should be assaulted.
The result of the Commission was a triumph for William, the manufacturers who had suffered at the hands of Broadhead subscribed 600 guineas and presented them to him, and a grateful Government rewarded him for his services by the honour of a knighthood, recommended by Lord Salisbury, in 1887.
William continued writing for the Telegraph until his death in 1902 and was buried at Ecclesall Church.
The Sheffield Daily Telegraph eventually became the Morning Telegraph, surviving as the weekly Sheffield Telegraph, and established what we now know as the Sheffield Star.
In 1855, soon after the abolition of newspaper stamp duty, that had set newspaper prices at 5d to 7d, a dour down-at-heel Scotsman called Mr Benson turned up in Sheffield. After looking the town over, he called at the offices of Joseph Pearce Jnr, a printer and bookseller on High Street, and told him that he had people in London and Manchester who proposed starting a newspaper in Sheffield.
Joseph Pearce was convinced, and Benson recruited shop canvassers from street corners to obtain subscribers at 1s 6d for a month’s issues. The campaign netted a small fortune, and the next day Mr Benson arrived at the office wearing a brand new hat a new pair of wellingtons.
Photograph by The British Newspaper Archive
The first issue of the four-page Sheffield Daily Telegraph appeared on June 8, 1855, distributed by Benson’s messengers on the back of a wheelbarrow.
Ten days later, Mr Benson, the comic-faced Scot disappeared and was never heard of again. His promised capital was so far behind him that it never caught up.
A man sent to London to telegraph back news milked from the national papers found himself out of pocket, and unable to ask for help, because Benson had failed to mention his colleague back in Sheffield. On his last night in London, the representative of the ‘country’s first great provincial daily’ had to split his journey home.
Joseph Pearce, left with the fallout, met his obligations to initial subscribers and decided to carry on. He arranged to take Reuter dispatches from the Crimean War, a story that was filling everybody’s minds, and sales started to grow.
There were already several weekly newspapers in Sheffield, all of which ignored this ‘upstart’, but when Sheffield writers gathered around the Sheffield Daily Telegraph, it burst this bubble of complacency, and one of them, the Sheffield Independent, was forced to publish daily as well.
Despite the rising popularity of the paper, published at 8am every day, it was a financial struggle for Joseph Pearce, and after nine years he decided to make way for younger blood.
Photograph of Editor’s office by Picture Sheffield
In 1864, Frederick Clifford and William Christopher Leng arrived, the latter becoming editor, and relocating to Aldine Court, off High Street.
Under these two, the Sheffield Daily Telegraph aimed to popularise the Conservative Party cause amongst the working class, and Leng’s trenchancy and personal courage during the trade union outrages in the 1860s enhanced the newspaper’s prestige.
By 1898 it was selling 1.25 million copies a week, along with its sister publications, the Sheffield Weekly Telegraph, with articles and serialised fiction, and the Sheffield Evening Telegraph.
In 1900, Winston Churchill became South African war correspondent for the Sheffield Daily Telegraph, as well as the Morning Post, and the January issue carried his story in four columns of his capture by the Boers.
Photograph by Prime Location
Between 1913 and 1916, a new front to the extensive old buildings of the editorial and printing departments at Aldine Court, was built. Constructed in English Renaissance-style, it was designed by Edward Mitchel Gibbs, and still dominates High Street today. (It was eventually replaced with modern buildings on York Street).
Photograph by Picture Sheffield
The Clifford-Leng ownership ended in 1925, bought by Allied Newspapers, controlled by William Ewart Berry, Gomer Berry and Sir Edward Mauger Iliffe, which had been systematically buying up provincial newspapers, though chairmanship was retained by Frederick Clifford’s son, Charles, who actively shared management of the paper until his death in 1936.
Sir Charles Clifford had arrived in 1878 and ten years later was instrumental in the purchase of the Sheffield Evening Telegraph’s rival, the Evening Star, a name familiar to us now as the Sheffield Star.
Photograph by Picture Sheffield
In 1931, Allied Newspapers bought the rival Sheffield Independent, printing both separately, but both papers started losing ground to the national press and at one time the loss of both seemed possible.
The Allied Newspapers partnership was dissolved in 1937, each partner needing a raft of holdings to pass onto their heirs, with James Gomer Berry, 1st Viscount Kemsley, taking control of the Sheffield operation, briefly dropping the word ‘Daily’ from Sheffield Telegraph, and amalgamating it with the Sheffield Independent in 1938 to become the Sheffield Telegraph and Daily Independent, with a broader policy embracing the fundamental principles of both newspapers.
During the first years of World War Two, Kemsley Newspapers, as it had been renamed by Lord Kemsley, became the Telegraph and Independent, commanding world correspondents of Kemsley newspapers, and across the British Isles.
The newspaper eventually became the Sheffield Telegraph and Independent, subsequently the Sheffield Telegraph, and was bought by Roy Herbert Thompson, 1st Baron Thomson of Fleet, in 1959.
Photograph by Picture Sheffield
In 1965, it was briefly renamed the Sheffield Morning Telegraph, then the Morning Telegraph, continuing a long tradition of producing excellent news correspondents .
Notable staff across its history have included Sir Harold Evans, who was later Public Relations Officer to Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, and head of ITV News; author Peter Tinniswood; novelists JohnHarris and J.L. Hodson; cartoonists Ralph Whitworth and J. F. Horrabin; critics George Linstead and E. F. Watling; sports writers John Motson, the BBC football commentator, Lawrence Hunter, Peter Keeling, Peter Cooper, Frank Taylor (who later survived the Munich Air crash of 1958), and Keith Farnsworth.
Other editorial staff members have included Keith Graves, who was later with the BBC and Sky TV as a much-travelled reporter; Peter Harvey, a long-serving feature writer who was awarded the MBE in 2002; GeoffreyL. Baylis, who in later years was honoured for services to journalism in New Zealand; Barry Lloyd-Jones, Brian Stevenson and Clive Jones, who were news editors; Leslie F. Daniells and Frazer Wright were long serving industrial reporters; Alf Dow, a news editor who was later the company’s first training officer, and ended his career in public relations at Newton Chambers; Richard Gregory, who became a leading figure at YorkshireTelevision and was later chairman of the Yorkshire Bank; GeorgeHopkinson; Jean Rook, who was later a women’s writer with the Daily Express; and Will Wyatt.
Photograph by Hold the Front Page
The Morning Telegraph was sold (along with The Star) to United Newspapers in the 1970s, ceasing production in 1986.
The collapse of the newspaper was attributed to moves by estate agents to move advertising away from the highly-popular Saturday edition, and set up what turned out to be an unsuccessful rival property guide.
In 1989, the Sheffield Telegraph was relaunched as a weekly and continues to this day, although now under ownership of JPI Media, formerly the ill-fated Johnston Press.
Allow me to introduce you to Henry Steel (1832-1915), somebody you’ve never heard of, but one of Sheffield’s larger-than-life characters. This ‘Great Master of the Odds’ made a fortune from bookmaking, earning so much money that his account at the Westminster Bank in Sheffield was its largest.
It all started with fishmongery, but as a young man he was quick to realise the gains to be made from horse racing. At first, he speculated with the ‘silver book’, but soon established a vein of gold having received the commission for St. Albans and later moving into London.
He became acquainted with John Jackson and Harry Hargreaves, both racehorse owners, and, along with his best friend, William Peech, ended up securing their extensive Turf business.
Henry’s clients included the rich and famous, counting amongst his close friends Lord Rosebery, and King Edward VII, when he was Prince of Wales, and who once gave him a valuable breast-pin. When Edward opened the University of Sheffield in 1905, he recognised Henry, left the procession, and shook him heartily by the hand.
After Blue Gown won the Epsom Derby in 1868, it is said that Henry strolled jauntily and unconcernedly down to Tattersall’s, the auctioneers, and deposited £90,000 (about £10.2million today) to buy a horse.
Henry was known at every racecourse and his transactions so enormous that he became known as ‘the Leviathan’, leader of the ring in the 1860s and 1870s, with society magazine, Vanity Fair, speculating that he was probably the richest man ever to have made his fortune in bookmaking.
His frankness and freedom sometimes tainted his reputation as a bookmaker, but he was always equal to jibes, and a ready repartee gave him the better of his critics.
Photograph by Picture Sheffield
Henry eventually moved to London, buying the Archbishop of York’s house, along with an extensive wine collection, but soon tired of it. He returned to Sheffield in 1870, bought Westbourne, and after some years moved to Tapton Court.
However, away from the track, Henry Steel was also famous for establishing Steel, Peech and Tozer, a famous Rotherham steel firm.
In 1875, the works of the Phoenix Bessemer Company had gone into liquidation with liabilities of £140,000. Henry, along with William Peech, Edward Tozer and Thomas Hampton, bought the works for £36,500, and turned it into a private company with a capital of £70,000. After enlargements and improvements, the business became a huge success.
Henry Steel died at Tapton Court in 1915, his will worth £652,418, that’s around £67.5million today.
Steel, Peech and Tozer joined Samuel Fox & Co, Stocksbridge, and Appleby-Frodingham Steel, Scunthorpe, to form United Steel Companies in 1918, subsequently becoming part of British Steel Corporation.
Back to those with connections to Sheffield, although this one remembers little about our city, and was brought up in very different circumstances to most of us.
Julian Mark Ovenden, actor and singer. Born Sheffield in 1975, the son of Rev. Canon John Ovenden, who was a vicar in these parts for two years. He moved away as a baby when his father took up a position at Ely, Cambridgeshire, and ended up living in North London after his father was appointed Chaplain to the Queen at Windsor Castle.
He knows the Queen, and when Julian wanted to research Noel Coward for a school project, he popped around to see the Queen Mother to discuss her love of Coward’s music. He ended up playing the piano, she sang.
As a youngster, Julian sang in St. Paul’s Choir and received a music scholarship to Eton College before reading music at New College, Oxford.
We know him for appearing in five series of Foyle’s War (as Andrew, the RAF fighter pilot son of Christopher Foyle) and in two seasons of Downton Abbey. In America, he’s appeared in Person of Interest.
Away from TV, Julian regularly appears in leading roles in the West End and Broadway, including Merrily We Roll Along, Finding Neverland and All About Eve. He’s also appeared at the Albert Hall and Carnegie Hall.
“I don’t really have any memories, sadly, of Sheffield. I do feel, when I come back up north, at home here, and I do love the people. But it would be stretching it to say I feel a northerner or a true Sheffield native. It’s a great city and culturally it’s thriving.”
He’s married to opera singer Kate Royal and has two children, Johnny Beau and Audrey.
I don’t wish to alarm people in these sobering times, but there is another threat to the people of Sheffield, and it lies beneath our feet.
It’s almost eighty years since German bombers dropped around 355 tonnes of high explosives and 16,000 incendiary canisters on Sheffield during the Blitz of 1940. The bombers targeted residential and industrial areas and the city centre received incredible damage, with The Moor, Angel Street and King Street almost obliterated.
While death and destruction were immense, Sheffield’s citizens might have been forgiven that one of our nastiest periods had been consigned to history.
Alas, we are still likely to suffer the consequences for years to come.
Photograph by Sheffield Star
According to experts, Sheffield is a ‘high risk’ area for unexploded bombs, those that fell from the sky, failed to detonate, and buried themselves deep underground.
Bombs often failed to explode because they were ‘dud’ – casualties of fast, furious and error-prone wartime manufacturing.
But why didn’t the authorities deal with them?
At terminal velocity, a bomb would have penetrated 3-4 storeys before detonating. If it failed, its downward motion sent it deep underground, leaving destruction behind and almost impossible for watchers to determine the exact number and location.
The legacy is that we almost certainly have dozens of unexploded bombs hidden under the streets of Sheffield, as well as in other cities across Britain.
It is only now that some of these unexploded devices are returning to haunt us. Over the years, bombs have been discovered near Bramall Lane, Hillsborough, Don Valley, Owlerton and Burngreave. And it is just four years ago that four bombs were successively discovered in Matilda Street.
Most of these bombs have been found on construction sites, the Construction Industry Research and Information Association stating that in one two year period an estimated 15,000 military items were extracted from UK building sites. Now that buildings are getting taller, foundations dug deeper, we are starting to uncover devices , about five per cent of which are still live.
Worryingly, discoveries are still being made as original sites are being redeveloped for a second time after blocks thrown up in the post-war building boom reach the end of useful life.
The problem with unexploded bombs is their unpredictability, with Army Bomb Disposal Units (split between the Royal Engineers and Royal Logistic Corp Ammunition Technicians) having little information about how long it has been there and how it might have changed over time.
Photograph by The Independent
Most construction in the UK is now subject to risk assessment on the likelihood of unexploded bombs underground. These assessments may take the form of visual interpretation using historical photographs, as well as with geophysical and geothermic surveys. A similar set of processes was used when the site was cleared to make way for the construction of the Moor Market.
The situation is a lot worse in Germany where barely a week goes by without a new discovery. In 2014, a German digger driver was killed after accidentally striking an unexploded British device at Euskirchen, north of Frankfurt. And last year, a large explosion in a field near Ahlbach created a huge crater and turned out to be an undiscovered wartime bomb exploding after 75 years.
“According to the rule of thumb, if German ordnance hit the ground, it exploded, while Allied bombs were notoriously unreliable,” says Stephen Taylor, a period munitions expert.
Planning application has been received for a new 13-storey development below the Washington public house. Photograph by Cartwright Pickard
The Fitzwilliam Street part of Sheffield city centre was developed in the early 19th century, from agricultural fields into Victorian terracing and warehouses. Of significance, is that the area was heavily bombed during World War Two and as a result was cleared and remained largely undeveloped until the 1970s and 1980s.
The boom in student accommodation has resurrected the area in the past decade, not least with another new planning application submitted to Sheffield City Council for a thirteen-storey block of 209 student studio apartments. If all current applications are approved, the area will once again revert to residential use.
But what is the history of Fitzwilliam Street?
Back in 1874, Samuel Everard, a prominent citizen of the town, made the following observations: –
“As we pass Bright Street, Fitzwilliam Street and Rockingham Street, let us know them as illustrations of the origin of our street names. They at once indicate the ownership of the soil by the house of Wentworth (of Wentworth Woodhouse).”
Photograph by Cartwright Pickard
The last Marquis of Rockingham, Charles Watson-Wentworth, married Mary, the daughter and heir of Thomas Bright, of Badsworth, near Pontefract, in 1752, who in her own right was Lord of the Manor of Ecclesall and owner of extensive estates in the vicinity.
It was said that the Marquis, when once taunted with marrying a woman of no blood, had replied, “If she had no blood, she had plenty of suet.”
The marriage brought the land into possession of the Marquis of Rockingham and it descended to his nephew, William Fitzwilliam, 4th Earl Fitzwilliam.
The names of Fitzwilliam Street and Rockingham Street are familiar to us all, but Bright Street, named after the Lord of the Manor of Ecclesall, has long disappeared.
It ran directly from the bottom end of Fitzwilliam Street towards Cumberland Street, crossed by South Street (that we now know as The Moor). It broadly spanned the same line as does Fitzwilliam Gate today.
Update. See revised plans for the scheme submitted in May 2022
sheffielder.net 