News - £2m boost for Sheffield heritage projects

STAFF at two historical attractions in Sheffield are celebrating after scooping £2 million in lottery cash to spend on improvements.


Sheffield Cathedral and Abbeydale Industrial Hamlet, which are each Grade I listed, have both been successful in applying for grants from the Heritage Lottery Fund.

Both can now do major work to transform them into top attractions for the city.

Fiona Spiers, head of the Heritage Lottery Fund for Yorkshire and the Humber, said: “This investment is fantastic news for Sheffield - two of the city’s much-loved heritage sites awarded funding to improve their visitor experience and bring them alive for the next generation.

“A stunning cathedral, dating back to 1430, and an 18th-century steelworks, a rare time capsule from a bygone industrial age, will now offer exciting opportunities for people of all ages to get involved in the heritage on their doorstep.”

Sheffield Cathedral has been awarded £1.3 million on a new entrance, learning and exhibition space, learning activities for children and adults, training for staff and volunteers, lighting, signs and historical interpretation boards.

Abbeydale Industrial Hamlet, a former 18th-century steel works near Dore, will spend its £895,700 restoring the delicate waterwheels and machinery and creating a new heritage and learning centre as well as training programmes for volunteers.

The aim is to encourage the community to learn and pass on traditional millwright skills for future generations.

John Hamshere, Chief Executive of Sheffield Industrial Museums Trust which is responsible for the Hamlet, said: “This is great news and we are delighted the bid has been successful.”

From: http://www.thestar.co.uk/lifestyle/2m-boost-for-sheffield-heritage-projects-1-4989065

Article - Boxing Day Retro: Fascinating flashbacks (Sheffield)

SHEFFIELD Cathedral may be big - but it could have been twice the size, writes Colin Drury.

It could, in fact, have had two spires, a massive nave stretching to Church Street and a completely new north side.

That’s if World War Two hadn’t got in the way. The massively ambitious plans were delayed during the conflict then scaled back in a post-war austerity age.

 

* IT’S not only 21st century newspapers which court controversy

The Sheffield Iris was ruffling feathers as far back as the 18th century.

Indeed, editor James Montgomery perhaps ruffled them too much. He was jailed in 1796 for daring to criticise soldiers who killed two unarmed protesters during a workers march.

Montgomery’s opinion piece was popular with readers but not with magistrates who locked him up for six months.

Today, as a Local Studies Library talk pointed out in August, the editor has a statue in the grounds of Sheffield Cathedral. Those magistrates don’t.

* SHEFFIELD University professors made thousands of Molotov cocktails in case of invasion during World War Two

This and other nuggets were revealed in Sheffield At War, perhaps the most comprehensive work on the city’s experience of the conflict.

Other titbits include how Hallamshire Battalion soldiers nicknamed a French ridge Snig Hill and the fact the Sheffield Twist Drill and Steel Company was considered so strategically important by the Nazis it was marked as a high priority occupation target.

The 1948 book was placed online by amateur historian Ted Mullins in August.

“It’s important these things aren’t forgotten,” he said. Quite right.

* THERE was almost a monorail in Sheffield

And August would have been its 30th anniversary.

Its advocates - including the British Government - said it would be a transport system from the future, gliding noiselessly on five-metre stilts, whizzing 10,000 commuters an hour along a two mile stretch of electrified tracks.

Its critics said it would be a £10 million monstrosity. They won the day.

* FITZALAN Square was once nice. Perhaps even harder for younger people to believe than the idea that a monorail was ever seriously considered.

This was just one of several stunning pictures of old Sheffield which made up Geoffrey Howse’s stunning Sheffield Then & Now book.

The tome, released in October, also showed a Steel City still home to old-school trams, a corn exchange and a Cole Brothers store at Cole’s Corner. Nostalgia at its best.

* ART imitated life a little too closely at Sheffield’s grandest 19th century theatre.

The Surrey, in West Bar, was the finest theatre outside of London - a towering monument to opulence complete with underground museum, upper ballroom and marble statues.

A shame, then, that in 1865, just 14 years after it opened, it burned to the ground.

The cause? A play which reproduced the Great Fire of London - complete with real on stage blaze - went wrong. After a performance on March 25, crews failed to damp the theatre down and the flames resparked.

Within two hours the largely wooden building was little more the smouldering embers. Where, Retro wondered in November, were the health and safety inspectors?

* SHEFFIELD United won the only FA Cup played during a world war.

Also known as the Khaki Cup Final, this match saw the Blades (pictured left) beat Chelsea 3-0 on April 24, 1915.

The victory was somewhat overshadowed, however, by events across the Channel - the same day thousands of British soldiers died during World War One’s first gas attack.

“The contrast was shocking,” said Blades historian Matthew Bell who released his book Red, White And Khaki this month.

That season remains the only one in which English professional football continued while the world war raged.

Edited from: http://www.thestar.co.uk/news/boxing_day_retro_fascinating_flashbacks_1_4093016

Exhibition - Our city’s twin towers (Sheffield)

IT is the oldest building in Sheffield, one of the city’s most instantly recognisable landmarks and a place where thousands gather each year to worship, to pray and to attend the odd concert.

But here is Sheffield Cathedral as you have probably never seen it before.

Because this is how the nearly 600-year-old Grade I listed building was set to look if hugely ambitious plans drawn up in the 1910s had come to fruition.

A second spire, a massive new south-facing nave stretching across the courtyard to where the trams now run and a complete redevelopment of the north side with a modern chancel and sanctuary would have made the cathedral one of the largest in the UK.

These pictures – and more than 100 others from the building’s long past – are to go on display at a special exhibition celebrating its history this month.

“It’s difficult to imagine just how impressive the Cathedral would have looked if the plans had been made reality,” says Paul Sewell, cathedral verger and the man behind the exhibition.

“But these pictures certainly give a flavour of just how huge it would have been if those plans had gone ahead.”

Those plans, then, were drawn up in 1913 when the then parish church had just been granted Cathedral status.

Sheffield was a confident and newly rich city – with the growth of the steel industry – and the Cathedral was to reflect its growing importance.

Celebrated ecclesiastical architect Charles Nicholson drew up the plans which would have been funded by the church and the city.

But, while huge swathes of the development were completed, including the Chapel of the Holy Spirit, the Crypt Chapel of All Saints, the Chapel of St George and the Chapter House – all on the north side and worked on in the 1930s – perhaps the more impressive elements never happened.

Why?

“It took so long to complete the development on the north side,” says Paul, “by the time they were ready to work on other areas World War Two had started and the plans were abandoned.

“There just wasn’t the material or funding to carry on, so it never happened.”

Indeed, when the conflict ended in 1945, and with Britain suffering a period of austerity, new scaled back plans were drawn up.

Another architect, Arthur Bailey, was appointed and it was his vision which we today see on the south side – a narthex entrance leading to an extended west end with a lantern tower, completed in the 1960s.

Although the new Cathedral – officially called the Cathedral Church of St Peter and St Paul – was considerably smaller than it would have been, it still dwarfed the old church footprint.

“In a way it was perhaps a blessing because one of the things people really love about the Cathedral now is its open courtyard,” says Paul.

The exhibition of photos, including several newly discovered pictures from the 1920s - 1940s, is being held to celebrate the Cathedral’s Gateway Project, a scheme to make the building more visitor-friendly.

It runs there July 11 – August 19.

A brief history of Sheffield cathedral

900s: The Sheffield Cross, a Saxon religious monument now housed in the British Museum, is believed to have been sited where today’s Cathedral is.

1100s: William de Lovetot builds the first church here. Stones from this first building can still be seen in the east wall of the Cathedral’s sanctuary.

1266: The church is burned down during the Second Barons’ War but is rebuilt some 14 years later.

1430: A new church is built – it is this which forms the basis of the Cathedral we see today.

1520: The Shrewsbury Chapel is built – the first of several expansions over the next 500 years.

1805: A diarist records the church is ‘one of the most gloomy places of worship in the kingdom’ and the nave is later pulled down and rebuilt.

1913-14: The church is granted Cathedral status. There follows four decades of expansion and improvements.

2011: The £1.25 million Gateway Project is launched to make the Cathedral more visitor-friendly.

From: http://www.thestar.co.uk/community/the-diary/our_city_s_twin_towers_1_3547129