Steel City Addenda

Latest in the Urban Trawl series: trying to be all Pevnserian in Sheffield, in BD. A few extra notes and addenda. I might write something longer about Castle Market soon, to really eke out every bit of prose from a few days' flanning about...Photos by Joel Anderson, as ever.

The NUM Headquarters 

Thanks to the commenter who suggested this one. The National Union of Mineworkers' national headquarters was originally in the Euston end of Bloomsbury, where its building can still be seen, near to the current offices of Unison. The decision to move it out of the Great Wen and up to the capital of the Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire was made, unsurprisingly, under Scargill, and it was apparently never entirely finished, with construction being abandoned in 1983. The architect Malcolm Lister apparently also designed Scargill's house in Barnsley, the one which he was (erroneously) smeared by the Mirror to have filched Union funds to pay for. What's left of the NUM is now based in Barnsley as well. The building must have been derelict for some time now, but it looked fine on the day we visited, a stocky and powerful little building, like a sobered-up pomo-era Jim Stirling, supposedly in the shape of a Miner's pick. It's slated for demolition like almost everything else of worth in Sheffield, but the recession should at least delay that...

Cold War Megastructures

Two of these which I missed by a few years are the apparently unlamented Town Hall 'egg box' that is nuked in Threads, and the 'wedding cake' which was used for non-religious nuptials, which certainly is lamented, at least by my interlocutors. What I did see was Manpower Services - a stunning building squatting at the edge of the Moor, a ferocious redbrick Ziggurat of remarkable geometric complexity and looming power; and two Jefferson Sheard buildings, the electricity substation, which has some of the finest concrete work I've ever seen, a feast for the beton brut enthusiast, boasting practically every permutation of ferroconcrete surface; and the completely different but cutely tacky Epic Development, former home of the New Roxy Disco, stepped down the hill and covered in public toilet tiles that have seemingly never been cleaned.

Anything before 1945

When you go around the markets and local shops you see a lot of books on the history of Sheffield, all of which seem mainly fixated with the 19th century - oddly, considering the city was, it's almost universally agreed, basically a suburb of Hell. There are a few derelict works in the centre, all mercifully un-Urban Splashed - but neither the industrial or commercial buildings remotely approach the awesome Gradgrindian brutality you can find in Manchester or Nottingham, while the buildings of the 50s, 60s, 70s and early 80s (irrespective of demolitions) are like nothing else. The industrial remants seem more interesting as weird townscape than as works of architecture, little enclaves you suddenly walk in and are transported through different temporalities, before being spewed back out into a would-be utopian 1962, an apologetic 1986 or a blandly pseudomodern 2009. What is of course most interesting is where they all collide, as in the shock of architectural disjunction you can see in the picture at the top of this post.

(many thanks to the Sesquipedalist for tips and tours, Lisa for Castle Market tales of seediness and to the Go boys for the zines)