page_title: Brutalism in Sheffield
section_title: Hanover House
hierarchical_section_title: Brutalism in Sheffield / Notable existing developments / Hanover House
caption_attribution_description: English: A residential tower block in Sheffield has some of its exterior panels removed with the cladding exposed for inspection following the Grenfall Tower fire, July 2017.
context_page_description: The 1950s and 1960s saw the construction of numerous brutalist apartment blocks in Sheffield, England. Sheffield City Council had been clearing inner-city residential slums since the early 1900s. Prior to the 1950s these slums were replaced with low-rise council housing, mostly constructed in new estates on the edge of the city. By the mid-1950s the establishment of a green belt had led to a shortage of available land on the edges of the city, whilst the government increased subsidies for the construction of high-rise apartment towers on former slum land, so the council began to construct high-rise inner city estates, adopting modernist designs and industrialised construction techniques, culminating in the construction of the award-winning Gleadless Valley and Park Hill estates.
context_section_description: Hanover House (simply Hanover when first built) is a single block of flats located on Exeter Drive, just off the A61 Hanover Way dual-carriageway which nowadays is part of the Sheffield Inner Ring Road. Construction of Hanover House was carried out by M J Gleeson on behalf of the Sheffield County Borough Council and commenced in 1965, completing in 1966. The single tower consists of 16 floors, all of them residential, containing a total of 126 residencies and rising to a height of 43 m (141 ft). The flats within Hanover House are addressed 101–349 Exeter Drive.
  Nine blocks of five-storey maisonette-style council housing were built on the roads surrounding Hanover House around the same time; additionally, the Hanover development was located a short distance from the now-demolished Broomhall complex on the opposite side of the inner ring road. The original exterior design of Hanover House consisted of exposed concrete accented with metal panes painted yellow. As part of a refurbishment of the tower, this was replaced in 2009 by green and grey plastic cladding covering the entire structure. The maisonettes surrounding Hanover House were refurbished around the same time, with external concrete panels being repainted blue, green, orange, red, maroon, lilac or terracotta to differentiate each block.
  The design of retrofitted cladding was strongly implicated in the devastatingly rapid spread of the Grenfell Tower fire which killed 72 people in a similarly-designed tower block in London in June 2017. As a result, safety inspections were carried out on all tower blocks across the country which had been retrofitted with replacement cladding. The cladding applied to Hanover House was the only tower block cladding in Sheffield which failed fire safety tests, and it was subsequently confirmed by Sheffield City Council that it would be removed. Removal of the cladding commenced in July 2017 and was completed by the end of the year. Replacement cladding, identical in visual design but now passing fire safety tests, was applied to the building from April 2019 onwards, restoring Hanover House to its pre-Grenfell appearance by the start of 2020.
caption: Hanover House in July 2017, with its cladding undergoing removal after failing fire safety tests following the Grenfell Tower fire.
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