Source: The Sunday Times 17/09/06
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2095-2361203,00.html
The revival of the metals business is only part of the city’s regeneration, writes Dominic O’Connell
On a recent visit to London, Hywel Jones, a senior lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University, made a special trip to Harrods to peer into the glittering cabinets of the department store’s famous silver room.
Jones wasn’t looking for a wedding present or an anniversary gift. He was hunting for items made from Lustre Silver, a new type of material he and colleagues had developed with a Sheffield company, Carrs.
It solves an age-old problem for makers of sterling silver. Unless polished, the metal tarnishes and blackens with age. “It’s a real problem,” said Ron Carr, who founded the firm 30 years ago. “People don’t want to buy silver now because they know they have to polish it to keep it nice.” A decade ago, Carrs sold 30 tonnes of silverware a year. Now it sells between 12 and 13 tonnes.
Carr hopes the new material will reverse the slide, as does Jones. “It is one of the biggest thrills I have had in this job, seeing something I had a hand in producing on sale at Harrods,” he said.
The collaboration between the university and Carrs is a sign that the metals business, which once ruled Sheffield and made it the undisputed iron, steel and cutlery capital of the world, is not yet dead.
It is playing a part in the city’s bigger drive to throw off years of urban decay and become a thriving economic hub.
Sheffield’s association with metalworking is almost as old as the city itself. Evidence of cutlery-making dates back 700 years, but the heyday was in the 17th and 18th centuries, when it was at the cutting edge of iron and steel.
Benjamin Huntsman, a clockmaker from Doncaster, invented crucible steel, the first type of cast steel, in 1742, an innovation that galvanised Sheffield. A century later, in 1856, Henry Bessemer perfected his converter, an egg-shaped furnace that ushered in a new era of steel mass production. He, too, set up shop in Sheffield. The 150th anniversary of the invention will be celebrated at a special dinner in the city this week.
The Bessemer boom made Sheffield king of world steel. Its products went round the globe - in 1871 two works, Brown’s and Cammell’s, exported to America three times as much railway track as was produced by the entire American domestic industry.
Sheffield could not hold on to the crown for long. By 1890 both America and Germany had overtaken Britain in terms of output. But the city remained in thrall to metal, arming Britain through two world wars and continuing in full production into the 1960s.
A decade later the bottom fell out of the market and Sheffield suffered badly. Employment in steel fell from 60,000 in 1971 to 10,000 by the mid-1990s. The downturn coincided with the decline of the Yorkshire coal industry and the rise to power in the city of a militant Labour group at loggerheads with the Thatcher government.
In 1984, police and striking miners fought pitched battles outside the Orgreave coking plant, eight miles east of the city centre.
Sheffield had become a byword for unemployment, deprivation and urban blight. The bleak era was caught in Peter Cattaneo’s film The Full Monty.
Civic pride was non-existent. “People were very negative here then,” said Richard Wright, managing director of Allvac, an American company that makes specialist metals in Sheffield. “If you said you were going to do something, they would say it wasn’t going to happen, or even if it did happen, then obviously you wouldn’t get it right.”
Sheffield’s civic leaders now claim that negativity has gone, and Wright agrees. “It has completely changed. There is a real can-do attitude,” he said.
Robert MacDonald, the Sheffield city councillor responsible for economic regeneration and planning, is happy the worst is over, but says the city still has a long way to go. “I would say there has been recovery, but not yet transformation,” he said.
Big efforts have gone into education and the expansion of the city’s two universities, Hallam and the University of Sheffield. “You cannot attract new industries unless you have the supply of graduates to feed them,” said David Curtis, the council’s director of development services.
The injection of large amounts of public money has undoubtedly helped. Public building works have transformed the city centre, replacing ugly 1960s office blocks and creating attractive new public spaces.
High unemployment meant Sheffield qualified for Objective One status under European Union funding rules, and by 2008 the city will have received £770m from Europe. After that year it will no longer qualify for special treatment because its employment rate is already back to the national average.
Civic leaders are now looking for a more diverse economy. “We have to look at services, to lure the big financial firms that might otherwise go to Manchester or Leeds,” said MacDonald, who would like to secure another of the big four accountancy firms to the city alongside Price Waterhouse Coopers.
“I think we are at a tipping point,” said MacDonald. “These days we have enough clout with developers to insist on them building really attractive office space and that, in turn, will pull in the right type of tenants.”
The drive for services includes a bid, submitted 10 days ago, for the first “super- casino” envisaged by the government. Sheffield is hoping to beat rival bids from six other local authorities.
MacDonald reveals there is a wider agenda behind the application; the city hopes that, if it wins, construction of the casino will require the building of a relief road at a crucial motorway junction. It would improve air quality in the area, allowing a start on regeneration of a large part of the lower Don valley that would otherwise have been hamstrung by pollution problems.
Visitors to the city will shortly be greeted by an impressive piece of civic sculpture - an 80-metre long stainless-steel wall, a gleaming “blade” that harks back to the cutlery trade.
“In terms of steel, we are actually processing the same tonnage we were at the end of the second world war, but with one-fifth the workforce,” said Nigel Tomlinson, chief executive of the Sheffield Chamber of Commerce and Industry.
Allvac manufactures on the same site as the Cyclops works, one of the city’s famous Victorian steel mills. Its products, however, are the highly specialised nickel and titanium alloys that are used in the oil and aerospace industries.
Its product line is constantly changing, said Wright. “We have to be aware that competition from low-wage economies is always moving up behind us, so we will drop products off the back end and bring in new, higher-value ones up front,” he said.
Other metal companies have survived the turbulence by finding stable niches. Swann- Morton makes 98% of the surgical blades used in Britain, and has 70% of the market in western Europe. It boasts a unique ownership structure. Half of the company’s shares are held in trust for the workforce, and half by a charitable trust.
Like carmaker Toyota, it is run according to a set of principles laid down by its founders - although Swann-Morton’s were drawn up slightly earlier than Toyota’s, and are more socialist in nature. The four precepts declare that the workforce comes first, and give staff the right to kick out the management if they “can’t do the job”. “They (the workforce) are the human beings on which everything is built,” they say.
Managing director Michael McGinley attributes the firm’s success to quality and speedy delivery. “We make 1.5m blades a day, and every one is checked twice before it leaves the plant. If you order a blade today, it will be delivered tomorrow.”
Swann-Morton’s workers have a 35-hour week and get 10 weeks’ holiday a year. Unsurprisingly, vacancies are quickly filled.
The key to Sheffield’s revival, said Tomlinson, was a partnership between business and the council. “When we see central government on issues, they ask us how we do it,” he said.
MacDonald said the local ruling Labour party had not abandoned its socialist principles. “By socialism I mean the greatest good for the greatest number. And if that means working with capitalists, that’s fine.”