Source: BBC News Magazine 11/09/06
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/5324458.stm
By Megan Lane
Its industrial heart ripped out, for years Steel City watched as neighbouring Manchester and Leeds sped ahead. But now, chosen to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale, has Sheffield's time come?
As an architectural jewel, Sheffield doesn't take much beating. Locals describe it as "a mucky picture in a golden frame", a former steel working centre nestling amongst the crags of the Peak District.
Yet here it is, showcased alongside the likes of Tokyo, Istanbul and New York at the glamorous Venice Biennale of Architecture, which opened on Sunday.
If Sheffield is representative of anything, it is of a post-industrial regional city seeking to regain its footing. There are many such in the world, hence its selection to represent the UK at the biennale, where the theme is the relationship between urban architecture and social dynamics.
Martyn Ware, the Sheffield-born founder of Human League and deviser of the British Pavilion's soundscapes, says what makes Sheffield everytown is that it's trying to reinvent itself and its workforce.
"Sheffield lost 70,000 jobs in the steel industry, and it's now turning to the service industry, IT and all that. That's very typical of a city its size in Europe, let alone Britain. Where Sheffield is different is in its attitude - locals call it the biggest village in Britain. It's got a reputation for craftsmanship and honesty, and it has opened its arms to giant numbers of students. That boosts its vibrancy."
Iconic carbuncles
Sheffield has taken quite a drubbing over the years as its prime source of income dried up and its handful of once-iconic buildings fell into disrepair. Today, it's on a mission to tart itself up with a £120m project to redevelop the city centre.
The "egg box" extension of the Town Hall pictured right has been felled by the wreckers' ball to make way for an elegant super-conservatory, and a vast, blighted inner-city housing estate - the notorious Park Hill estate - has been earmarked for redevelopment.
And the disused cooling towers at Meadowhall - symbolic of the Sheffield of old - may be transformed into giant artworks in Channel 4's Big Art project.
All very much in keeping with the new Sheffield. The area near the train station has been re-dubbed the cultural quarter, a loose collection of creative and multi-media firms with the Showroom Cinema and Workstation Cultural Industries Business Centre at its heart.
Is there a risk, in pushing the creative side of Sheffield, of further alienating those dispossessed when the steel industry shut down?
Ware is unapologetic. "The older, perhaps more conservative, elements are the people going to Meadowhall [an out-of-town shopping centre]. That gutted the city centre when all the shops moved out.
"Sheffield's tactic now is to repopulate the city centre. These new flats often cost a fortune, but at least now when someone makes some money, they don't automatically want to move to the country."
If you build it
Architecture has been hailed as the city's saviour several times before, and has come up wanting.
A reminder sits slap-bang in the middle of the much-vaunted cultural quarter - the silver drums of what was the National Centre for Popular Music, which opened to great fanfare in 1999 and closed with indecent haste. Too few visitors, too much debt. Today it is a students' union, with the tatty edges that implies.
Decades earlier, grim terraces above the city centre were torn down and replaced with the Le Corbusier-inspired Park Hill flats. Completed in 1961, the vast block was hailed as a revolutionary approach to inner-city housing.
Fast-forward a few decades, and it was derided as a carbuncle. Fast-forward to today and it's a listed building.
Jim Dale, a design lecturer who has lived in and around the city since the age of four in the 1970s, says physically Sheffield is a very strange city.
"It feels the need to tear itself down and rebuild itself every couple of decades. The new buildings that have come in are great, but knowing Sheffield's record, what will we think about them in 20 or 30 years when something else is in fashion?
"But it's funny that the iconic carbuncles that have fallen from favour - the egg box, the wedding cake [a circular 1970s register office] - all had rather affectionate names. That's Sheffield humour for you."
'Sheffo' on the up
Because there is not one defining landmark of the city - other than Sheffielders themselves - the British pavilion at Venice uses soundscapes, a digital "warts and all" mural and photography of streetlife to convey the city's essence.
Team leader Jeremy Till, director of architecture at the University of Sheffield, says one reason Sheffield got the nod was the calibre of people involved.
"There are incredibly good creative industries in Sheffield because you get these slightly maverick people who are not interested in the mainstream. Think of the People's Republic of South Yorkshire against Margaret Thatcher - it's always been slightly on the margins."
Arty types have long sprung from the loins of the city of steel and cutlery, among them Human League, Pulp, Moloko, and not one but two of this year's Mercury Prize nominees.
Mark Lucas, a web developer who took many of the photos on this page, says Sheffield has been transformed since the dark days of the 1980s. "It was a parochial, culturally barren industrial city. Today, although it doesn't match Leeds for urban chic, it offers a better balance between quality of life and the commercial and cultural energy of a big city.
"The presence of the two universities has added significantly to the city's quality, attracting students to settle, as well as helping to jump-start creative and thought-powered industries."
Jim Dale says he's never managed to put his finger on what he loves about the city. "My old boss put it best when I left my job in Newcastle to move back here - 'there's just something about the place'.
"There is, but I still don't know what it is."