[Owen went to Sheffield to do something important recently. I tagged along. Sheffield is a marvellous city, but is intent on destroying all its good bits, especially Park Hill. We did something on Castle Market as well, but that's going to be on another site shortly]

Oh I'm sorry/But I had to make love to every crack in the pavement and the shop doorways/And the puddles of rain that reflected your face in my eyes - Pulp


Immediately outside the station is a long wall celebrating the already-haunted future people of 'Creative Sheffield'. At least two of them had realised the horror of their fate.

This sort of sums it up really - on the site of an old iron foundry stands a rebuilt entrance gate covered in 'no entry' signs.

Neither working nor demolished. Welcome to Britain: if you don't buy a coffee you can't have a piss.

The isotype of blank-faced mother and child is oddly moving.


This used to be the Roxy. Now it's some boring sub-Millennium Dome spin-off.

Some vague chess could be partly played here.

This frightened little creature adorns a hydroponic shop. If you get stoned you can stroke him.

This beautiful curve is the delivery ramp for Castle Market. Chris Petit should make a short film about it.

We laughed hard at the corporate area being covered in classic wino detritus. We had thought that with the rise of super-strength lager that day-time public wine drinking from the bottle was probably something reserved for the hay-fields of impoverished bits of Southern France. But no, there it is, resting pointedly at the bottom of one of those benches you can't lie down on properly that councils like so much.

Walking up and down stairs should always feel like an event.

Nauseating. Aggravating. Patronising. Stultifying.
Nu-language adorns the walls of this Music-Museum-turned-University-building...

...which looks like something aliens might wee in on long trans-galactic journeys.

Quite.

An equal-opps impromptu rubbish dump near the Site gallery.

How brilliant is this?! A cafe-train. It carries on around the corner. Sadly, it was closed otherwise I'd have had a milkshake and cheese sandwich whilst pretending I was on my way to Ormsk.

In the afternoon, we scaled the heights of the city to pay a visit to Park Hill.

Certainly, we were trying to understand the deepest recesses of something.


I would look every which way for a tram. Sheffield's tram system has marvellous elements: multi-use pedestrian/tram stop areas where you can feed the pigeons, for example. Incidentally, they don't eat toffee, or at least not the kind we tried to give them.

The view from Park Hill is superb: Sheffield looks like a giant gleaming fantasy future village.

Only about a third of Park Hill is currently occupied. Everyone is supposed to hate it, but I just don't get this at all. Whilst Urban Splash might be doing their 'oh well someone's got to deal with it, seeing as we can't knock it down' (it's listed), the truth is they want it because it's good and they know it. They just want to fill it with yuppies. It's class war and nothing else.

The streets in the sky are wide enough for a milk float to drive through them, were anyone still to receive milk in this way.

Every door has the number etched into the letter-flap. I briefly considered taking a photo of each one, before realising we did actually have to get the train back later that day.

Boarded up.

I hope they keep this when the yuppies move in.

Park Hill has, or had, a reputation for crime, but there were open doors and chairs for sitting outside on the walkways.

The red theme is kept on the stairways and playground.

It's pretty much impossible to capture the size of Park Hill with one mere camera.


This grass should be filled with gleeful infants.


Someone has been putting German Expressionist woodcuts around the estate.

Oxidation disagrees.

New enclosures. Some of Park Hill has been stripped out to be refurbished fit for a 'better class' of resident.



Whereas in the city centre you'd have to buy an overpriced drink to be allowed to shuffle off your waste (where's the profit in that?!), Park Hill has public toilets. They were closed of course, being too utopian to be allowed to work any more.


Park Hill is structurally sound.

'This astonishing structure is a battered remnant of a very different country, one that briefly turned housing for working people into futuristic monuments rather than shamefaced hutches. The ideologies of regeneration and heritage, when applied to the very different ethics of new brutalism, can only destroy the thing they claim to love.' - Owen.

The Urban Splash regeneration magazine for Park Hill reads like the back of an Innocent Smoothie bottle.

'I love you. Will u marry me?' it says on this walkway. And they say there's no romance in concrete.



As beautiful as the stripped out block is, it would look even better filled with the old flats and people enjoying the sunlight.

Back in town, we tried to get closer to this stairwell, but were prevented by locks and our fear of security guards.

This mural to steelworkers was put up at the exact moment that the industry was being destroyed.

A Co-op building in every city.

Castle House is listed, much to the annoyance of Sheffield City Council, who feel that the listing 'is simply giving Sheffield an additional burden that could potentially hold back regeneration in that area'.

£0.00 rent. The economy at ground zero.

This bar enlists Scrabble to its branding cause. I would love a bar that forced you to play Scrabble.



Intellectuals, Humans and Romantics all invoked on this dull building with extremely strange non-balconies.

It's not Britain, it's Eastern Europe! Marvellous oh-so-very-there block downtown.


Stickers on the windows. The bottom one is from 'Rare and Racy', an extremely good bookshop where Owen purchased a book about African modernist architecture.

More signs than signifiers, or is it the other way round?



Sheffield is famous for its steel. Somewhat surprisingly, the Eye Witness Works is still used for the production of knives and other metal goods, according to one report - or at least this was true in 2007.


It's a brutalist sub-station! Of course it is.




This ziggurat to human resources is the ManPower services building, finished in 1978.


Make way! Make way! Really boring regeneration coming through!

Now these seats were pretty sexy, all the more so as you could lie down on them and drink quality wino wine on them, not that we did that at this time as we are both broken animals who would not have made it past a couple of days had the Enlightenment not stepped in to rescue us with its medicine and machines. On the plus side, I think my ulcer might be finally healing. I should go for more walks.

Next time I go to Sheffield I'm staying here.

One of the few interesting new developments. You'll have to guess what it is (hint: cars go here).

On our way back to the station, some more apparitions appeared to be enjoying themselves on a hoarding behind which more development was taking place. Sheffield: your future looks horribly dull. Park Hill - hell, the entire city - does not belong to architectural ghosts!