Model City | Pete Green

Retail display, Millennium Galleries, Sheffield (Pete Green)

In a post-industrial age, the character and distinctiveness of England’s cities and regions is much diminished. Places whose identities were once informed by their key economic activity – textiles in Lancashire, say, or the railways in Derby and Crewe – scrabble around in the remains to build an updated sense of self which might reconcile their unique industrial history with their new reliance on employment in the far more generic settings of call centres and distribution hubs.

The degree to which cities retain a distinctive culture and feel can vary, though. Many Sheffielders believe theirs succeeds more than most. The automation of processes means steel production no longer provides much in the way of local employment – and globalisation means the wealth it generates mostly leaves the city without touching the sides – but steel continues to be made here. Most people living in Sheffield today have no link to the industry, but are sharply aware of its past significance. The ‘Steel City’ nickname is still used widely.

Sheffield also hosts a vibrant grassroots arts and crafts scene. Buildings where steel from local foundries was once worked into cutlery and tools now provide cheap, central sites for independent galleries and studios. To some extent the city’s economy has diversified into creative and digital industries. It has also received a boost from the arrival of a substantially expanded student population, many of whom arrive in Sheffield from other countries, China in particular.

Last year an initiative was declared jointly by the city’s council and universities with local groups representing business and culture, supported by Arts Council and lottery funding:

In 2016 Sheffield celebrates a Year of Making, an opportunity to foreground all forms of making in the city and region – from advanced manufacturing, specialist steels, forged products, cutting tools, flanges, bearings and blades to award winning theatre, international art and design, ground-breaking research and world class talent.

The Year of Making 2016 celebrates our past, present and future as a city of makers and promotes a world city with an international reputation for excellence and innovation.

[Sheffield City of Makers]

It’s fair to say that ‘making’, in its various forms, comprises a significant aspect of whatever distinctive identity Sheffield might profess today. The passage quoted above demonstrates that in formulating a version of that identity, rather than erase or replace the heavy industry of yesterday, the Year of Making initiative consciously sought to accommodate steelmaking – in both its present and past forms – alongside cultural and academic ‘products’ such as theatre and research.

So central, in fact, is the idea of ‘making’ to this version of Sheffield that its narratives commonly redeploy the verb ‘to make’ as an intransitive rather than a transitive verb. A transitive verb has an object: I’m singing a song, you’re making a fork. An intransitive verb has none: I’m singing, you’re making. In this version of Sheffield verb matters more than noun. The act of manufacturing is more significant than the (grammatical or manufactured) object. What you’re making has become less important than the fact that you’re making it.

Branded display, central Sheffield (Pete Green)

Perhaps it’s a kind of cultural fetishisation to impute greater value to a manufacturing process than to its product.

Among other intentions, my poem Sheffield Almanac invites the reader to reflect on some of the assumptions that underlie the ‘City of Makers’ narrative.

One assumption is that it is economically useful. Comparison with other cities might suggest otherwise. A 2016 study compares Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle and Sheffield by the percentage of jobs in manufacturing and in high value services, and by average wages and tax yield per job. Of those five major northern cities, Sheffield has the greatest proportion of jobs in manufacturing and the smallest in high value services. Of those five major northern cities Sheffield also has the lowest average weekly wage, and the smallest tax yield per job.

So, how does this explain Sheffield being left behind? Well, a big manufacturing sector is not a great thing for the economy of a developed world city. Technology means that factories don’t generate the jobs they once did; competitive pressure from factories all over the world mean that many of the jobs which do exist are unlikely to be particularly well-paid… The most economically successful cities tend to have smaller manufacturing bases, but much larger knowledge-based service industries. On that measure, Manchester and Leeds are clearly way out ahead.

[CityMetric]

The ‘making’ narrative, though, as we’ve seen, incorporates more than just the traditional manufacturing sector taken into account by the CityMetric analysis. It may be that the agenda to present ‘making’ as a whole, comprising the processes of the factory alongside cultural, creative and academic activity, succeeds in creating a ‘brand’ which makes Sheffield a more attractive place to visit or set up a business.

Or perhaps what we might lose in GDP from Sheffield’s obdurate adherence to a ‘making’ economy, we might gain in other, less tangible benefits. It feels good to be part of a city with an identity. I enjoy the fact that my adopted home has an industrial heritage that it’s proud of. And lots of galleries, festivals of zines and documentary film, and DIY gigs in repurposed steel workshops. And it makes a lot of very good ale. I like being able to walk through the city and see where all these things go on. If I moved to Leeds or Manchester, there’d be considerably more jobs I could apply for, but I’m not sure I’d find a civic identity I could buy into quite so readily (and we can be certain I wouldn’t if I moved to the south).

Retail display, Weston Park Museum, Sheffield (Pete Green)

You can view this version of Sheffield by visiting the city’s Millennium Galleries (a venue managed by Museums Sheffield, one of the partners in the Year of Making project). Among the superbly curated exhibition rooms, one celebrates the history of the cutlery industry and the small-scale artisan steelmaking that goes on today. Another has recently highlighted various other local products, from propeller blades to craft beer. A beautifully produced Year of Making film depicts the processes in a Sheffield potato crisp factory and its contented employees.

The gallery’s shop sells an excellent range of locally produced art and craft items, stationery, books, toys, shoulder bags, greetings cards, preserves, and pretty things for the house. It also sells bottles of Henderson’s Relish.

Henderson’s Relish is a bit like Worcestershire sauce (you’re not supposed to say that, but it is). It’s made in Sheffield, and you see it everywhere you go in Sheffield. But it’s not widely available outside the city. This exclusivity has elevated the product from a condiment to an icon of civic pride – or a metonym for Sheffield’s distinctiveness.

There are Henderson’s recipe books, T-shirts, badges and art prints. ‘Limited edition’ bottles are sometimes produced, replacing the standard design with the colours of the two local professional football clubs. The University of Sheffield recently announced that it will generously preserve a disused former Henderson’s factory, which sits among many of its other buildings, by turning it into a pub.

Perhaps it’s another kind of fetishisation to value the cultural significance of a condiment above what it tastes like on your pie and peas.

Retail display, Millennium Galleries, Sheffield (Pete Green)

Some of the art and craft items on sale around the city depict local landmarks. These have included the Park Hill estate – a famous brutalist block of former council housing, whose ongoing redevelopment by Urban Splash is regularly denounced as an act of gentrification. They have included the cooling towers of the former Blackburn Meadows power station alongside the M1, which were demolished in 2008 despite a campaign to retain them as some kind of monument or venue for arts and culture.

Sometimes the makers will create art using elements of Sheffield dialect and accent. On the wall of a pub near my home there’s a periodic table of Sheffield dialect. This is not a wealthy part of town, nor is it deprived, and the pub is populated largely by people who either already have a degree or are in the process of acquiring one. It’s not a place where I’ve ever heard people say thee and tha, or reyt mardy, except in a knowing, affected way.

As we walk past the periodic table of Sheffield dialect we look at it and smile. We have taken the speech patterns of Sheffield’s working class as a raw material from which to manufacture a pleasing cultural commodity for middle-class consumption. We’ve done it with fondness and the best of intentions. But that’s what we’ve done.

I wonder sometimes whether the tendency to frame Henderson’s on your wall rather than splash it on your dinner plate isn’t found disproportionately more among white-collar incomers to the city and less among working-class native Sheffielders. I wonder whether we respond with more zeal than is necessary to ‘iconic’ condiments and council estates because we are anxious for acceptance in our adopted home. I wonder whether the version of the city that’s predicated on the new ‘making’ narrative isn’t fundamentally a sort of middle-class meta-Sheffield.

That might be overstating it. It’s not just the better-off who are proud of Sheffield or who believe it’s different from (and better than) other places. Violent disorder occurred in many English towns and cities under both the Thatcher and Cameron governments; both times, Sheffield was the only large settlement unaffected by rioting. One explanation put forward was civic pride. I don’t know how grounded that is in reality, but I do remember one hashtag trending locally during those nights of unrest in August 2011: #SteelCityNotStealCity.

If Sheffield differs from the rest of England in its social divisions, though, it does so only because they are sharper here than elsewhere. Broadly speaking, areas in the city’s south and west are healthier, wealthier and more educated than areas in its north and east. The various related indices of deprivation and quality of life follow the pattern: infrastructure, property values, life expectancy, and the incidence of crime and road traffic accidents.

As with other large cities, areas of severe poverty developed in the 1970s and 1980s after job losses in a key industry. But Sheffield’s unique landscape has also played a role in its social division.

The topography of the Lower Don Valley was particularly suitable for industrial development, and 19th century housing to accommodate the workforce was located in the area. In contrast, the higher ground to the west was settled by the factory owners – upwind of the pollution from the factories. In the twentieth century this polarisation was exacerbated by the concentration of council housing to the east. Sheffield is one of the most polarised cities in Britain, with the more affluent neighbourhoods to the west and the poorer to the east. The National Park to the west of the city precluded the development of dormitory suburbs as are found near many other cities: there was little middle class flight to leafier places.

[A Tale of Two Cities: The Sheffield Project]

Perhaps the gains made from the city’s new-look ‘making’ economy don’t share out evenly. Perhaps both the economic and cultural benefits accrue disproportionately to a comparatively privileged sector of the city’s population.

Either way, there is more than one version of Sheffield. The version you’ll see in Fulwood is radically different from the version you’ll see in Upperthorpe, and the version you’ll see in Crookes varies dramatically from the one you’ll encounter in Tinsley (where, despite already lethally bad air quality, a new Ikea is being built, not far from the site of those demolished cooling towers).

Not all these versions of Sheffield are equally visible. And their co-existence is not without tensions. In the 2016 referendum, while Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle voted to remain in the European Union, Sheffield narrowly voted to leave. As we saw during the riots, overlooked communities express frustration through self-destructive behaviour. But this doesn’t always mean smashing shopfronts and torching cars.

Retail display, Millennium Galleries, Sheffield (Pete Green)

It’s not that working-class voices are never heard. At Weston Park Museum a film about Park Hill features former residents sharing their memories. But none seem to diverge from the view that Park Hill was an excellent place to live (and implicitly, perhaps, that the revamp is worth the cost). As with the happy workers in the crisp factory film, working-class voices are heard – but only as incorporated into the de facto official version of Sheffield.

None of this, of course, is to imply that initiatives like the Year of Making shouldn’t happen or that the intentions behind them are anything other than noble. We’re lucky to have Sheffield Museums: the job they do is outstanding, and all the more so given the huge funding cuts they’ve suffered.

Nor do I seek to suggest that I’m not complicit in any processes of appropriation or commodification, if that’s what they are. When a designer created beautiful Park Hill-themed artwork for my band’s first single, I gave my enthusiastic approval. When a petition was got up to save the cooling towers, I signed it, while sitting comfortably at home on the other side of Sheffield. A poem is not a manifesto. I’m not here to say Something Must Be Done; still less, that I’ll do it, or that I even know what. My purposes here, and in the Sheffield Almanac, are simply observation and an invitation to reflect.

And even in pursuing those limited aims I could have it all wrong. Once the Henderson’s Arms pub has opened on campus, and you’re in there having a drink, listen out for the accents around the room. If you hear any actual working-class people, tell me right away. I’ll come over, acknowledge my mistakes, and buy you a two-thirds of artisan cappuccino porter.

 

Pete Green’s Sheffield Almanac appeared from Longbarrow Press in 2017. The pamphlet is currently sold out: you can read an extract from the poem here.

Pete Green’s latest publication is Hemisphere (Longbarrow Press, 2021), the story of an impossible journey, told in verse, which circumnavigates the politics of interaction between people, places and poetry. On a chaotic round trip from the Hebrides across the north Atlantic, Canada, Alaska and Siberia, the poem invites reflection on government and nationality, geography, language and ‘post-truth’, fertility, decay, and imagination. Hemisphere is published as a 48-page ‘short book’, with illustrations by artist Abi Goodman; you can order the book here.

 

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