Sheffield
I walked from one side of Sheffield to the other last night. I hadn't intended too, it's just that I missed the tram from Norfolk Park by 30 seconds and couldn't be bothered to wait 20 minutes for the next. I had just played football at the brand spanking new "Goals Soccer Centre at Norfolk Park. I am brilliant at football. Anyone who says otherwise is a liar and is just jealous of my skills.But that is besides the point; I walked from one side of Sheffield to the other and I have to say it looked very nice. A lot of effort has been made to make the key pedestrian routes through Sheffield look sparkly and pretty and now that the work is nearing completion you can finally start to see all the separate bits come together to form an attractive and cohesive whole.
Crossing the shiny new footbridge across the shiny almost completed Midland Station with its shiny new signs and shiny new entrance leaves a much better impression than it did when I moved to Sheffield 8 1/2 years ago. Within a month or so Dyson House will be dust like its equally ugly brother Sheaf House is already, and work can be completed on the station concourse. Incidentally, him off of Grand Designs visited the demolition of Sheaf House, no doubt after reading about it on this blog, and Channel Four will soon be screening a programme about the regeneration of Sheffield.
The regeneration becomes even more noticeable as you follow the path up past the Polytechnic. You then cross the road past the shiny Millennium Galleries with its big bold red Anthony Caro sculpture outside (I am officially the only person in Sheffield that likes it), and onwards past the shiny new Winter Gardens, the new shiny Macdonald Hotel (which opened yesterday in fact). Then to the top of Fargate, past Victorian fronted buildings that were once blackened by soot but are now restored to their former glory. Onwards further past the newly renovated City Hall fronted by a couple of cool fountains.
You know, I really should take my camera with me on the same walk so you can see exactly what I am talking about. It is a huge difference over what was there before and it's not even complete yet. Of course maintaining a city like Sheffield is never really completed; it's like painting the Forth Bridge, an un-ending task. When the route I travelled yesterday is fully completed (within the next 12 months) work will begin on the Retail Quarter. Hopefully when that is nearing completion work will have started on the Sheaf Valley, rejuvenating another swathe of Sheffield all the way from Park Square roundabout to St.Mary's roundabout where Decathlon currently sits. That's if we don't all die from Avian Flu in the mean time of course.
2 Comments:
an ex colleauge of mine has spent the last 15 years or so photographing sheffield in it's shifting state from fixed points around the city. He has 1000s of images. He plans to do something with them when he retires in 20 years, like a big exhibition or somehting.
... but before he does this, can you do the walk again with the camera this time? I would love to see how Sheffield is shaping up. Or I could just wait until new year ;-)
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