Abbeydale Industrial Hamlet, Sheffield

Sheffield’s Abbeydale Industrial Hamlet museum illustrates the entire history of the city’s traditional metal trades on a single site.

Before the railway came and made possible Sheffield’s heavy steel industry in the East End, the manufacture of cutlery and edge tools took place on the fast-flowing river valleys of the Don Valley, mainly to the north and west of the town itself.  Only with the arrival of steam power did the “little mesters” begin to concentrate their works in town.

The Abbeydale Works can be traced back to at least 1714, perhaps to the “New Wheel” mentioned at the site in 1685.  The present buildings date from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and show the full range of processes involved in producing edge-tools using the crucible steel methods developed  by  Benjamin Huntsman in 1742.

The Abbeydale works made scythes in a sequence from the manufacturing of clay crucibles, the furnace, to the forging and grinding, boring and setting of scythe-blades ready for the handle to be fitted elsewhere, laid out logically around a spacious courtyard.

The vernacular buildings, including the workmen’s cottages and the Manager’s House of 1838, all built of local sandstone, sit easily in the wooded landscape, and it’s possible to forget the large millpond behind, holding back a placid-looking, prodigious weight of water that provided power for the works.

The waterwheels, tilt-hammers, blowing-engine and grindstones show that, because materials were simple and technology primitive by modern standards, the high level of precision and workmanship achieved in the trade depended on the skill and physical hardiness of the craftsmen who worked here.

For all its peaceful, rural setting, the site also recollects the “Sheffield Outrages”, a series of terrorist acts by which trade-union members sought to intimidate non-members by sabotage and violence.

In November 1842 an explosion in the middle of the night destroyed the grinding shop and practically immobilised the works, presenting, according to the Sheffield Iris, “a scene that is rarely witnessed in a country not at war”.

The manager, Mr Dyson, had employed two workmen “who, though industrious and efficient workmen, did not belong to the union, and therefore Mr Dyson came under the displeasure of the men who compose the committee appointed by the union”.

Twenty years later, a subsequent tenant, Joshua Tyzack, was shot at:  the fact that the only casualty was his top hat didn’t make the incident any less threatening.

Tyzack, Sons & Turner finally closed the works down in 1933, and two years later the charitable trust set up by the Sheffield philanthropist J G Graves purchased it complete and largely intact.

Indeed, the works briefly resumed during the Second World War.

In 1964 the Council for the Conservation of Sheffield Antiquities began to investigate and restore the site, and since the 1970s it has been a popular tourist site as well as an invaluable educational resource.

The 60-page, A4 handbook for the 2017 ‘Sheffield’s Heritage’ tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £15.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Doncaster Street Cementation Furnace, Shalesmoor, Sheffield

Standing incongruously in a car-park, the Doncaster Street Cementation Furnace is a precious relic of the origins of Sheffield’s steel industry.

A cementation furnace is a distinctive conical structure, which resembles the bottle-kilns of the Staffordshire potteries and serves a similar function.

Swedish or Spanish bar-iron and charcoal, sandwiched like a layer cake, was heated to a temperature of 1,100-1,200°C in sealed sandstone vessels heated by an external coal fire.

The resulting product was called blister steel and was uneven in quality because the outer blistered surface of each bar was tougher than the core and no two bars were consistent.

The earliest surviving cementation furnace in Britain is the stone-built example at Derwentcote, Tyneside, dating from c1730.

The Sheffield furnace, dating from 1848, is the very last survivor of around 250 such furnaces which dotted the city until the end of the nineteenth century.  It formed part of a group of five in the works of Daniel Doncaster & Sons.

It remains complete, with the hearth and the surrounding flues that directed the heat around the two parallel sandstone chests which contained alternate layers of charcoal and iron, sealed by a crust of “wheelswarf”, that is, debris from blade-grinding combined with sandstone dust.

Each firing produced up to 35 tons of steel.

The blackout mask on top of the conical chimney was added after it was damaged in the Sheffield Blitz.

When the rest of the works was demolished the new landowners, Midland Bank Ltd, now HSBC, fenced it off and restored it.  It’s easily visible from the surrounding streets, and can be inspected more closely by picking up the key from Kelham Island Industrial Museum.

Update, January 2023:  Three years after planning permission was granted for residential development with the furnace as a centre-piece, the site has been cleared but no building work has started, and the location has been added to the Heritage at Risk register by English Heritage.

The 60-page, A4 handbook for the 2017 ‘Sheffield’s Heritage’ tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £15.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.