Whenever I’ve led A Walk Round Attercliffe, whether for schoolkids, postgraduate architectural students or Heritage Open Days participants, the itinerary always ends at Attercliffe Baths.
The Lower Don Valley History Trail blue plaque on the corner of the building says that the Baths “provided both swimming and washing facilities for the area at a time when bathrooms at home were unknown” and “ was also Attercliffe’s speakers’ corner”.
A trawl through local newspapers in the online British Newspaper Archive reveals a more detailed view of the importance of this landmark building.
Keeping clean and healthy in the profoundly grubby, polluted atmosphere of the industrial East End was a never-ending battle for the people who lived in the modest terraces, and particularly for the men (and, in wartime, women) who grafted in the hot, noisy, dangerous works that towered above the streets.
The countryside disappeared from the Don Valley from the 1840s onwards, and Sheffield’s first baths, at Borough Bridge in Neepsend, opened in 1869. Ten years later, the Corporation completed the Attercliffe Baths on the corner of Leeds Road and Attercliffe Common.
The fact that they cost almost £13,000 – four times the cost of the Neepsend baths – caused controversy, and subsequent municipal baths of equivalent size were cheaper: Upperthorpe Baths cost £8,484 when it was completed in 1894.
The architect of Attercliffe Baths was William Horace Stovin (1833-1908), the assistant borough surveyor. He died in Canada, but his name lives on in Stovin Drive, Darnall.
For a century, the pool at Attercliffe Baths was used for swimming and lifesaving lessons, recreation and sport, and the slipper baths gave Attercliffe people the opportunity, at modest cost, to luxuriate in a private cubicle with a deep tub, hot water, soap and a towel for a few pence.
There were downsides to this busy, popular place. The changing cubicles around the swimming pool were protected only by a curtain, and thefts were frequent. Only those who were caught and sent to court are recorded – a pair of boots in 1881, sums of money lifted from pockets, from 1½d to £1 9s 6d. Once, in 1908, an alert manager, John Parker, noticed a “somewhat unusual” sight, a boy in girl’s clothing. The costume was stolen, and the thief was fined twenty shillings by the Stipendiary Magistrate.
There were fatalities in the slipper baths – from epilepsy (1903 and 1931), “natural causes” (1924) and an attempted suicide in 1911.
In 1894 the Attercliffe Free Library was built on the adjacent land on Leeds Road, and there was talk of a “laundry”, which eventually became the Wash House at Oakes Green a quarter of a mile away, opened in 1937. Other less likely schemes, for a Turkish bath and an open-air pool, were shelved.
Furthermore, the Baths was a focus for public political meetings, sometimes indoors – the Attercliffe Independent Labour Party (1903), the Socialist Labour Party (1906) and the Anti-Socialist Union (1910). Otherwise, meetings were held in the open air, or groups met outside the Baths, where there was plentiful road space, before processing elsewhere.
The baths closed in the 1980s. The pool was filled in, and a conversion to office use retained and refurbished some of the interior features that cost so much in 1879, such as the tiled staircase with its cast banister incorporating the then newly-awarded borough coat of arms.
So much of Attercliffe’s architectural heritage has been lost that it’s gratifying to know that Mr Stovin’s staircase is in good condition.
