Sheffield: architecture and morality, ruins and austerity
By: Dan Hill
Tags: Cities, Politics, Architecture, UK Politics, Urban Planning

It’s a tough area that looks after itself, which is just as well, really. It tends to resilience as well as mawkishness, so you’re left with a sense of the area’s strength above all. Park Hill is ludicrously large and firm, facing the winds and rain year after year, stolid and relentless in the face of the decades of neglect that northern towns have to endure. Sheffield, like many northern European towns, has an inner-strength that makes the most of unpromising surrounds. I’m not aware of a local word equivalent to the Finnish sisu, but Sheffielders would recognise the sentiment. It works hard, makes, sometimes fights, and just gets on with things in entirely unshowy fashion, head down into the wind and rain. It is well ‘ard, as we used to say in the playground. Perhaps that’s the sisu equivalent.

As a result, Park Hill is still standing there, looming over the railway station and city centre, graciously suffering the ’tarting up’ of its southern facade, a stop-start process somehow at the whim of global currency markets, or the largesse of local government. It’s too early to gauge whether the development will fundamentally improve things, though it feels compromised already. Yet things can only improve, in a sense, as the place had effectively been allowed to become a ruin beforehand, and so it only just escaped the fate of its relations down the East Lancs Road, or in East London. It could well have ended up like the sorry excuse for a ruined castle a few hundred metres away at Manor Top, the trace of a wall holding only some bricked up windows and the faint, and presumably fading, hope of an English Heritage grant.

But could the retrofit recapture that progressive zeal that the original building had? I can’t help but recall that sorry lamp stuck on the ruin of the pub, of how aspects of a culture resisted these moves from within. The times have changed, and many new aspects of Sheffield culture would now be perfectly happy with ’European-style’ (whatever that means) apartment living and café bars, a rather thin lifestyle-led agenda that nonetheless fuelled Urban Splash’s rapid early success in Manchester—even if that success did not last. But how ‘90s that all sounds now (I know; I was there and often feel somewhat ’90s too). That sentence might as well be set to a backdrop of Dummy. It’s entirely out of step with Austerity Britain, and the reality of what happens to lifestyle-led anything.

Sheffield does need vision; the city is (was) doing OK economically, all things considered, head just about above water. But you still can’t perceive a long term vision for the place, at least not here. Many local people here have it. But do those actually nominated to drive the city forward have it?

Given I was up close and personal, what these photos don’t show is the sense of the topography, the great sweeping slopes in all directions, leading mainly though not exclusively down into the valleys that converge into what would become the middle of Sheffield. It’s something that I took for granted, growing up here, and having played football on almost all of those bitterly windswept hills — being in a football team as a kid gets you about the city in a unique way. But perceptive ‘outsiders’ like Hatherley noticed it instantly, wandering about a local ‘hill town’ urbanism.

These landscapes are so beautiful if would be relatively easy to work with the grain of the topography to make something truly memorable, truly wonderful. To work with the idea of hill towns woven into big city, and to take the language and social emphasis of brutalism and pioneering ‘60s architecture — as sketched out at Park Hill, but also reminiscent of Lasdun’s terraces of UCL in Bloomsbury or the South Bank, or Neave Brown’s work in Camden— and converge with the elegant sweeping forms of contemporary architecture. Looking at his masterplans and built work in Urbino, Italy, we might wonder what Giancarlo di Carlo would do with Sheffield.