Green Lane Works gateway rear view, Kelham Island, Sheffield
There has been an island close to the centre of Sheffield since the twelfth century when the town’s corn mill was built. The goyt carrying water to this mill left the River Don below the present-day Ball Street Bridge and ran parallel to the river until it reached Lady’s Bridge, the main river-crossing for traffic north into Yorkshire. The land in between was known for centuries simply as “the Isle” or “the Island”, and there’s a reference to the Isle as late as 1795.
The upstream area of the island may have acquired its name from the town armourer in the seventeenth century, Kellam Homer, who operated the Kelham Wheel by 1637.
Fairbanks’ maps of 1771 and 1795 clearly show that the surrounding area was still agricultural in the late-eighteenth century – the Duke of Norfolk’s nurseries were located at the present-day Nursery Street – but the River Don’s usefulness to industry quickly changed the townscape. Water- and steam-powered works, along with workers’ housing, filled the area in the early decades of the nineteenth century.
Not all these works were processing metal. Another street-name, Cotton Mill Row, indicates a factory which was converted into a workhouse for six hundred inmates in 1829. It was prone to overcrowding and repeatedly extended until it was replaced with the Firvale Workhouse (now part of the Northern General Hospital) in 1880.
The Sheffield Corporation Tramways Power Station was adjacent to the river and survives as the Kelham Island Museum, illustrating the industrial and social history of Sheffield.
Tucked away by the riverside, Kelham Island played a significant role in the city’s development, and its recent redevelopment as a desirable place to live, thrive and be entertained has drawn attention to its historic interest.
These bodies are sorely needed because the city’s track record of valuing and conserving its historic buildings is – to put it politely – patchy. Sheffield is rightly proud of its acknowledged status as the Home of Football, its tradition of craft beers and breweries, the Crucible and Lyceum Theatres and the Sheffield Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus.
Sheffield Museums tells Sheffield history through its artefacts, and the city’s built heritage includes five Grade I structures and sixty-seven at Grade II*. The city’s listed buildings range from a 1929 police box, at least five K6 telephone boxes and numerous post boxes to the largest listed building in Europe – Park Hill Flats (1957-61).
Volunteer advocacy and action have played a part in safeguarding empty and decaying buildings across the city. Within sight of each other across Fitzalan Square stand Canada House (the former Sheffield United Gas Company headquarters), the Creative Industries Institute (formerly the General Post Office) and the new S1 Artspace headquarters (originally an earlier General Post Office, later the Sheffield Stock Exchange and latterly Yorkshire Bank Chambers) – all of them repurposed for future use.
However, the recent losses are manifold: the Market Tavern, Exchange Street; the Old Coroner’s Court, Nursery Street and the Wiley & Co façade, 23-25 Haymarket were demolished within twelve months in 2024. None of them were listed, and the Market Tavern was owned by the City Council.
The City Council has in the past had much to answer for, but it can’t print money. One of the notorious cases of neglect is the Old Town Hall, which the Council has never actually owned. It has suffered continual neglect since it was sold by its historic owners, the Sheffield Town Trust, in 2000.
Nigel Slack, chair of the Victorian Society South Yorkshire Group, wrote in its January 2026 newsletter that refurbishing the Grade I-listed “new” Town Hall after thirty years of minimal maintenance will cost between £320 and £420 million, which creates concern that the limited municipal support for historic buildings will effectively dry up.
In the same month, Sheffield’s online news outlet, The Tribune, ran an article by Dan Hayes, ‘Are we England’s friendliest city?’, pointing out that the city has at least 249 “Friends” organisations, whereas Nottingham has only five. Alongside an estimate that if the volunteers’ effort was rewarded at the level of the current minimum wage it would cost well over £2 million a year, Dan pointed out the social benefits of the camaraderie which volunteers enjoy while contributing thousands of hours of their free time. They enjoy what they do pro bono, and their neighbours benefit from the results of their labour.
The City Council has encouraged local voluntary groups to take care of heritage assets since the early 1990s, but as funds dried up, so did the amount of practical support that the volunteers received, yet they carried on. Different groups, from the Wadsley and Loxley Commoners to the Friends of Wardsend Cemetery and the 100-acre Shire Brook Valley Nature Reserve, enrich their locality in differing ways, because they have attracted enthusiastic individuals who have bonded through a common purpose. One project officer describes the volunteers as “the life and soul of the site”.
Some groups have more frustrations than success: the Friends of the Old Town Hall have doggedly monitored the building’s decay since 2014 and any practical rescue scheme will be built on the foundation of their efforts.
A trustee of one of the organisations not mentioned here wearily commented that it seemed government policy to let charities run the country. Scepticism in these circumstances is understandable, but it’s the spirit of bonhomie that will carry forward popular efforts to safeguard the local heritage.
Nevertheless, before the current cohort of volunteers feel their age, they need to encourage younger people to join in and offer their energy.
That’s the vital challenge that must be addressed alongside the fundraising and the myriad practical tasks that keep the environment healthy.
Demolished Sheffield illustrates some of the Sheffield buildings that have been demolished since the mid-1970s, alongside others that remain but face an uncertain future.
Sheffield’s historic buildings have been retained or rescued in times past by citizens alert to their value, but much has been lost, and some of it is regretted.
Mike Higginbottom’s text draws attention to some of the reasons why much-loved landmarks bite the dust, and queries whether some of them could have had a future.
In particular, the book gives examples of surviving buildings that fall beneath the radar of listing and conservation-area status but can make an important contribution to the townscape and to community well-being.
Demolished Sheffieldhas 112 A4 pages in full colour and features twenty-seven sites across the city, and one in the Borough of Rotherham.
National Tramway Museum, Crich, Derbyshire: Sheffield 74
‘Hidden in Open Sight with Calvin Payne’ is an informative Substack by one of Sheffield’s most popular local historians.
Some time ago Calvin posted an image of a tram at the Batley Street terminus, noting that the street is now named Crabtree Close, and picked up on a refreshingly precise and helpful history-forum thread, in which a contributor ‘Waterside Echo’ pinpointed the date of the photo to late 1902. The Batley Street siding off the Barnsley Road opened in August 1902, and the tram was fitted with an enclosed top deck in 1903.
There’s a different photograph of a similar tram on Batley Street, taken from a different angle at around the same time, in Kenneth Gandy’s Sheffield Corporation Tramways (Sheffield City Libraries 1985), p 120.
Calvin was intrigued that the street had had three names – Brook Lane until 1886, then Batley Street and more recently Crabtree Close – and that the doyen of Sheffield street-names, Peter Harvey, listed it twice in his alphabetical survey, Street Names of Sheffield (Sheaf Publishing 2001), once in its own right and also as part of the collection of roads named Crabtree after the location.
I came to know about the short-lived Batley Street terminus by a different route. Once when I visited the National Tramway Museum at Crich, the Sheffield tram 74 was running with the destination ‘OSGATHORPE’.
The place-name isn’t much used nowadays, except for a little-known public park which “offers a tranquil escape from the bustling city”. Osgathorpe Road lies directly opposite Batley Street/Crabtree Close, and the 1905 Ordnance Survey 25-inch map shows the locations of now-demolished residences named Osgathorpe House, Osgathorpe Cottage and Osgathorpe Hills.
‘Waterside Echo’ refers to Charles Hall’s Sheffield Transport (Transport Publishing Company 1977) to piece together the origins of the tram route from town, along Barnsley Road and Firth Park Road to Page Hall, which the tramways department obstinately described as Pitsmoor, though it’s over a mile beyond the actual Pitsmoor.
Electric trams began operating to Page Hall within a month of the first electrified route from Tinsley to Nether Edge beginning in September 1899.
The end-to-end service was operated by single-deckers because of doubts about the braking power of double-deckers on the steepest gradient beyond Osgathorpe. The Batley Street siding was brought into use in August 1902 so that short-working double-deckers could reverse at the furthest safe point out of town. By January 1905 the double-deck cars were considered safe to run down to Page Hall, whether by an easing of the gradient or a strengthening of the brakes, and the siding was closed.
That fits with a hypothesis I’ve nursed for decades sitting on the top decks of buses travelling from town along Barnsley Road. There’s something odd about the road formation from the toll house where the nineteenth-century Burngreave Road joins Pitsmoor Road, the Wakefield & Sheffield Turnpike, which dates from 1757.
It’s possible to explore this virtually by googling ‘Pitsmoor Toll House’ on Google Earth and heading away from Sheffield: Barnsley Rd – Google Maps.
On the left, from the Church of God Seventh Day, there’s a stretch of road behind a retaining wall higher than the modern Barnsley Road. The retaining wall continues as far as Abbeyfield Primary School where the gradient dips downhill.
Then, at Crabtree Close (formerly Batley Street), on the opposite, right-hand side of the road, there is a separate elevated footpath at a higher level, which eventually drops steeply to meet the main road at the former Sheffield Companions Club, now a mosque with a couple of shops, at Fir Vale.
Presumably the present carriageway was regraded at some time for safety, but the tramway histories are silent about whether it was connected with the introduction of electric trams at the start of the twentieth century.
I often think of the novelist George Eliot’s remark in Middlemarch that “the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity”.
I’ve so often sat on a bus observing these features and never turned up an answer. And if Calvin hadn’t posted the 1902 photograph of the tram I’d never have found out about the Osgathorpe grand houses, and I’d have been less well-informed about the area where I’ve lived since the mid-1970s.
The Sheffield Waterworks Company is most remembered for the collapse of the company’s Dale Dike Dam, which inundated the Loxley and Don Valleys, killing at least 250 people in March 1864.
But for this catastrophe the company might be celebrated for its enterprise in bringing fresh drinking water to the town, following its incorporation in 1830.
The oldest of all the water-supply reservoirs that served Sheffield is still in water. The Old Great Dam of 1785 is now the lake in Crookes Valley Park.
The Sheffield Waterworks Company first built Hadfield Reservoir west of Sheffield at Crookes in 1833. In response to inexorable continuing demand, three additional reservoirs opened at Redmires, far out of town, in 1836, 1849 and 1854.
The Redmires water was carried to Crookes by a conduit begun in 1836, running for 4½ miles mostly in the open, with a thirty-foot-high aqueduct (demolished after 1950) across the Tapton valley and a 1,200-foot tunnel, three feet in diameter, at the lower end.
Calvin Payne, whose explorations of Sheffield’s buried utilities are well-known through his “Drainspotting” walks, began to explore the conduit in 2023 and enlisted members of the Sheffield History forum.
Calvin has shown that it’s possible to explore much of the conduit’s line and has collaborated with Wobbly Runner, a highly skilled videographer, to reveal that this prodigious engineering undertaking for its date has largely survived, hidden in plain sight, for nearly two hundred years.
The conduit was used for water supply until 1909, and the Hadfield Reservoir was replaced by a covered reservoir on part of the site in 1950. The remainder of its area now provides facilities for the Sheffield Waterworks Sports Club.
Its visible presence is limited to the names nearby of Reservoir Road and Conduit Road.
It’s ironic that one of the most significant features of Sheffield’s infrastructure is largely unknown to local inhabitants and visitors. It deserves signposting, interpreting and commemorating, as part of the city’s heritage and a resource for people to explore and enjoy.
My latest book, The Abbeydale Picture House: Sheffield’s premier suburban cinema, is now on sale. It’s a long story, but a short book, telling the history of a much-loved building, the people who worked there and the thousands whose lives were brightened by it from 1920 onwards.
The Abbeydale Picture House has always been exceptional among local cinemas. Its architect, Pascal J Stienlet, designed the auditorium and stage as a theatre, so the balcony embraces the proscenium and the stage has a fly-tower and a suite of dressing rooms which I’ve come to suspect were never completed.
The building sits on the edge of a steep cliff overlooking the River Sheaf, so the space under the stage was fitted out as a billiard saloon, and the ballroom beneath the auditorium had a sprung floor and a disconcerting sloping ceiling to match the rake of the seating above.
Its original proprietors struggled in the face of post-war inflation and quickly handed the place over to a more experienced team who were involved in two other cinemas south of the city centre.
It took until the 1930s for the shareholders to receive a modest dividend, but from then till the late 1950s the Abbeydale brought in crowds to watch films, dance and play billiards. The Abbeydale offered warmth, comfort and style. A whole generation of local people met their life-partner under its roof.
As times changed and suburban cinemas went out of favour, it was the third last suburban cinema in Sheffield to close, in 1975.
It was quickly adapted as an office-equipment showroom, but since then attempts to find it a practical purpose have repeatedly failed, until True North Brew Co acquired it at the beginning of 2025 and made firm plans to restore and refurbish it as a multipurpose entertainment centre – which was exactly its function in the 1920s: Abbeydale Ballroom | Sheffield’s new social space | pool hall.
I’ve been involved in the Abbeydale’s heritage since the 1980s, and had the good fortune to build my knowledge on Dr Clifford Shaw’s extensive research, and on oral-history interviews carried out by a Sheffield University postgraduate student, Holly Dann, both of whom talked to people who remembered the Abbeydale since before the Second World War.
It’s arguably the only surviving first-generation cinema in Sheffield that’s physically intact, architecturally interesting and has an abundance of stories about the people for whom it was and is a landmark in their lives.
Of the fifty-two cinemas that were operating within the then city boundary in the first month of the Second World War, the Abbeydale is the only one that has so many tales to tell and has the potential to bring enjoyment to future generations of Sheffield people.
A participant on a recent Heritage Open Days tour remarked, “I’ve passed this place hundreds of times and never realised how beautiful it is.”
The Abbeydale Picture House: Sheffield’s premier suburban cinema has 56 A5 pages in full colour.
To purchase, please click here, or send a cheque for £10.00 per copy payable to Mike Higginbottom at 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ. Contact: 0114-242-0951 or 07946-650672 or mike@mikehigginbottominterestingtimes.co.uk
Webb’s sewer gas destructor, Monckton Road, Wincobank, Sheffield
The Victorian preoccupation with sanitation was at least as significant in its time as the current concern about climate change and global warning is in the twenty-first century.
For decades I’ve been giving lectures and organising tours under the titles ‘Victorian Cemeteries’ and ‘Victorian Sewerage’ to illustrate the spectacular achievements of the Sanitary Movement but the topic is actually much wider than water supply, sewage disposal, cemeteries and crematoria.
It embraces such matters as awareness of hygiene, the development of cheap mass-produced soap, the water-closet, public lavatories and communal baths, improvements to hospitals and medical practice, vaccination, street lighting and paving, and garbage collection. It’s a huge topic which we tend to take for granted.
I’m presenting my ‘Victorian Sewerage’ lecture to the Friends of Zion Graveyard on Monday evening, October 20th, at the Upper Wincobank Undenominational Chapel, Wincobank Avenue, Sheffield, S5 6BB, when I’ll illustrate the Grade-II listed sewer gas destructors nearby – gas lamps with a sanitary purpose.
The installation of public sewers in nineteenth-century towns and cities was a huge public benefit, but it wasn’t a perfect solution. Tons of human ordure trickling underground to the sewage farms made their presence felt as vapours rose from the drains into the atmosphere at ground level, and methane in the sewers could in some circumstances cause explosions.
A Birmingham engineer, Joseph Edmund Webb (1862-1936), first patented his sewer gas destructor in 1892, connecting a conventional street lighting column to the sewer system rather than the town gas supply, so that sewer gas was ignited by the flame, at a temperature of around 700°F, destroying the methane and its persistent smell.
The amount of methane released sometimes failed to keep the lamp lit, until Webb’s subsequent patents provided for a back-up town-gas supply, and a system of filters and traps ensured that the flame remained lit twenty-four hours a day.
Ten local authorities had ordered destructors by 1896 and subsequently the company supplied towns and cities not only in Britain but to France, Spain, Canada, India and Singapore.
Because Sheffield’s hilly terrain meant that underground gradients could trap gas and cause dangerous concentrations of methane, the city installed eighty-four Webb destructor lamps, more apparently than any other public authority.
These unregarded public-health assets were gradually superseded by the practice of fitting ventilator stack pipes to buildings, venting the gas to the atmosphere at a sufficient height for it not to be a nuisance, and gas street-lights eventually gave place to electric lamps.
Sheffield’s Webb destructor lamps were disconnected from the gas supply in the 1960s, yet four in the Nether Edge area were restored as a heritage feature in the 1990s.
By the millennium only twenty-four survived, in various states of neglect, and twenty of them were listed Grade II and restored by a partnership of Sheffield City Council, English Heritage, Historic England and the bespoke lantern manufacturer, Pudsey Diamond Engineering Ltd.
No other British city has such a splendid collection of listed sewer lamps.
I’m grateful to Penny Rae, who invited me to speak to the Friends of Zion Graveyard, for alerting me to the two sewer lamps on the road from Shiregreen to Meadowhall which, to my shame, I’d never noticed before, though I’ve driven past them hundreds of times.
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.
A Walk Round Attercliffe: The pilot Walk Round Attercliffe, starting and finishing near the Attercliffe tram stop is sold out, and there’s a further opportunity to join this 2½-hour exploration on Sunday June 7th 2026, 2.00pm-4.30pm, starting at the Attercliffe tram stop
Birley Spa, Hackenthorpe, Sheffield: Large Plunging Bath (2008)
Birley Spa is a surprise,– a nineteenth-century bathing-resort hidden in the middle of the post-war Hackenthorpe housing-estate on the outskirts of Sheffield.
Local tradition maintains that the spa is ancient, but its documented history only dates from 1734 and its practical development followed a 1788 survey which proposed the building of a Bath Hotel, laying out paths and building two bridges across the stream.
In 1843 the Lord of the Manor, Charles, 2nd Earl Manvers, financed the development of the present building, incorporating a range of seven plunge- and shower-baths built into the hillside on the lower level, and on the upper floor a “lodging-house” with facilities to drink the waters as well as “tea, coffee and other refreshments”, run by a resident manager.
There were two distinct water-sources – an iron-bearing chalybeate spring for drinking, and the Large Plunging Bath was filled with “water as pure as chrystal [sic]”.
Birley Spa offered annual subscriptions from 15 shillings, and single baths ranged in price from the “Best Marble Hot Bath” at 2s 6d, to a simple cold plunge in the large bath at sixpence. Subscribers to the Bath Charity were entitled to recommend “Poor Persons”, on a sliding scale, to make free use of the Spa.
A special omnibus-service ran from the Commercial Inn in the centre of Sheffield, twice daily except on Sundays.
The hotel closed in 1878 and its accommodation was converted first into residences. The hot baths and showers fell out of use by 1895 and have now disappeared, but the large sandstone oval plunging bath, 25 feet by 18 feet and 5 feet deep, survives.
The grounds of the Spa were developed between the World Wars as a privately-operated children’s playground including a boating-lake and paddling pool, wishing well, swing-boats and a sandpit. The now-demolished balcony of the Spa House was used as a bandstand.
All this activity ceased on the outbreak of war in 1939, and in the 1950s the site came into the possession of Sheffield City Housing Department, which in 1960 proposed to demolish the Spa buildings.
The City Architect, Lewis Womersley, presented an alternative scheme to retain the buildings as a community hall, and this was partially completed in 1966.
Birley Spa was listed Grade II in 1973.
Although some essential maintenance was carried out in 1986, the site suffered increasingly from neglect and vandalism until in 1988 the City’s Countryside Management Unit began a programme of conservation, interpretation and restoration, involving local schools, community groups and the frogmen from South Yorkshire Police.
The initial aim was to recreate the Spa as a local amenity, as it had been at two distinct periods in its history, initially by encouraging its use as a pleasure-ground, and later by restoring the bath-house to use and perhaps marketing the mineral water.
In the event, the restored bath-house has been displayed but not used, and it has been cared for by volunteers involved in a succession of groups which became the Birley Spa Preservation Trust in 2018.
One of the admirable characteristics of the Methodist Church is its practicality. As its name suggests, there is a methodical streak in its mission and its traditions, which impels its members to move with the times.
When Hugh Price Hughes’ Forward Movement prompted Methodists to attend to social care alongside individual faith, the Sheffield Wesleyan congregation looked at the four city-centre chapels and promptly knocked one down.
The Wesley Chapel, opened in 1780 by John Wesley himself, had become out-of-date and unsuitable for the church’s needs, so it was closed in 1906 and replaced by the magnificent Victoria Hall two years later.
Although £6,000 had been spent on refurbishing Wesley Chapel in 1875, its replacement cost £40,000 and the debt was cleared within three years.
The original design was by the short-lived Manchester practice of Waddington Son & Dunkerley, modified and completed by the Sheffield architect William John Hale (1862-1929). The finished building is imposing, with an assertive façade and a huge tower with a baroque turret, built of brick and embellished with carvings by the brothers Alfred and William Tory. When it was built it rivalled the other tall buildings in the city centre, the two town halls and the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches which are now both cathedrals.
Its main hall had three levels: visitors entered from the street at circle level; the floor of the hall was in the basement, and there was a balcony. It was the best concert venue in Sheffield until the City Hall opened in 1932; there are those that say it still is. Significantly, the Hall was designed with spaces to serve a range of functions.
The first minister, Rev George McNeal (1874-1934), was recruited from the hugely successful Manchester and Salford Mission, and at the inauguration he made a landmark proclamation of intent.
The Victoria Hall was to be –
a great evangelical preaching centre
the headquarters of a strong, vigorous and active Mission Church
a house of mercy in the centre of the city with an ever-open door
a people’s home, the social and religious centre of their thought and activity
a rallying ground for all kinds of philanthropic and religious enterprise in the city
His declared aim was to create “a brighter, purer and happier Sheffield”. Immediately – and for long after Rev McNeal moved in 1924 – the Sheffield Mission responded practically to the needs of local people.
He founded the Sheffield Mission Labour Yard near the Wicker which provided 5,903 days’ work to unemployed men by June 1909, chopping firewood, cleaning, whitewashing.
During the First World War the Hall offered a transient refuge for forces personnel travelling through the city.
Three days after the first night of the Sheffield Blitz in December 1940, the Victoria Hall staged a scheduled performance of Handel’s Messiah, though almost all the surrounding buildings were wrecked.
From May 1941 to the end of the Second World War the Hall ran a Forces’ Rest Hostel which provided food and shelter to 80,000 servicemen trapped overnight by erratic train services.
Eventually the carefully designed and expensively built Victoria Hall became outdated. Congregations dwindled so the place was taken apart. In 1965-66 a floor was inserted in the main hall at circle level to create a separate space in the basement, while maintaining capacity for large audiences and congregations on special occasions.
Five shops were inserted into the building on Chapel Walk, providing scope either for commercial rent or mission activity.
In 2003 Ablett Architects designed a refurbishment to the shops that harmonises better with the Edwardian original.
And yet again, in 2015, The Foundry Sheffield, which leases the building from the Methodist Church, is refurbishing and repurposing the Victoria Hall while joining the newly founded Sheffield Charitable Network.
In fact, the city is drained by five significant rivers – Don, Loxley, Rivelin, Porter and Sheaf. That makes six hills, each of which early industry utilised to power water mills.
The Don, which flows to Doncaster, is joined by the Rother in Rotherham.
The Sheaf is said to give the city its name, which explains the sheaves of corn on the city’s coat of arms.
The Loxley, which flows eastwards from the Pennine foothills through Bradfield to join the River Rivelin at Malin Bridge and then the River Don at Owlerton, brought the waters released by the Dale Dike Dam disaster thundering through these villages in March 1864.
On the northern side of the Loxley valley, a chapel was constructed in 1787 at a cost of £1,000 by members of the congregation of St Nicholas’ Church, Bradfield, who resisted the dismissal of the minister, Rev A Benjamin Greaves.
This fine, dignified building looks out above the road to Bradfield. Practically square in plan, it’s distinguished by its elegant Venetian windows. It could accommodate up to a thousand people and is surrounded by an extensive burial ground.
By 1798, after Rev Greaves had moved on, the building was leased to Dissenters and when they bought it for £315 it became Loxley Independent Church and, later, Loxley Congregational Church.
Through the nineteenth century the chapel and its surroundings were repeatedly improved – a schoolroom and minister’s house in 1855, the burial ground extended in 1875, and the chapel restored in 1890-91 – and in the twentieth century, with a depleted congregation, it continued to act as a focal point for the widespread farming community. In 1972 it was renamed Loxley United Reformed Church.
By 1985, when it was listed Grade II* [LOXLEY UNITED REFORMED CHURCH, Bradfield – 1314565 | Historic England] indicating its historical and architectural importance, it was also placed on the Buildings At Risk Register. After storm damage in 1989 it was extensively repaired and reopened in 1990, but two years later services ceased, though burials continued in the cemetery, and in 1996 the United Reformed Church sold the chapel and the cemetery to a private developer, now Ali Property Development.
The chapel continued to deteriorate until on August 17th 2016 it caught fire. The fire brigade had difficulty putting three tenders within reach, and the roof and interior was entirely destroyed, leaving only the outside walls which remain fenced off and abandoned.
The Friends of Loxley Cemetery was founded in 2019 to maintain the graveyard, safeguard the ruined chapel and take responsibility for the congregation’s records. They’ve worked hard to clear the badly overgrown burial ground and reveal a remarkable collection of monuments and gravestones. The back page of the Friends’ publicity leaflet shows the impact they’ve had on the site: folc-publicity-leaflet-dec-202 (e-voice.org.uk).
At least twenty-two people who perished in the Great Sheffield Flood are buried at Loxley, and there are fourteen war burials – military graves from both World Wars and that of an air-raid warden killed in the Sheffield Blitz.
There are also two memorials to victims of the respective tragedies of the Titanic (1912) and the Lusitania (1915).
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