A woman sat by the window, glancing at the power stations and canals. Occasionally, she would turn to her husband and pass comment. When a young Yorkshire-Asian family got on the train at Doncaster, she grinned widely and fondly at their youngest member, a little girl with dark and wonderful eyes. ‘I used to work in a nursery with girls like you, Love. Best times of me life.’ Both the woman and her husband displayed Yorkshire Mouth, that local condition through which jaw lines protrude to allow proficient gritting of teeth. It is not an intentionally unfriendly look, more a contented ‘seen it all before one’, a happy, minor gurn.
Across the table from me, a boy of thirteen or fourteen studiously reads the Kerry Katona-clad pages of Chat magazine. This was the new Yorkshire: nostalgic but modern, traditional but progressive. Most of all, inclusive. It ladled warmth and belonging all over me. Despite my Teesside birth and Middlesbrough loyalty, this was the county in which I grew up. It makes for a strange, dual nationality only confused further by living in Scotland. When asked of my origins I reply, ‘I’m a Yorkshireman, but I support Middlesbrough.’ I belong to both.
The woman turned to her newspaper, read and then shook her head: ‘’ave you seen this poor lad that got murdered. Eeee, there’s some buggers in the world. They should string ’em up and throw away the key.’
I consulted the pages of my own newspaper. There was an article about Manchester City, ‘... a club where Harvey Nichols sends a mobile shop to the training ground and the menus are put together by Marco Pierre White.’ To our left, the glass nipple of Meadowhall shopping centre stood pert. ‘I do love Meadow’all,’ said husband of String ’Em Up, ‘It’s got that smashing food court.’
Sheffield soon sprawled alongside both sides of the train, yards of metal shapes and dead chimneys interspersed with surviving industry, a key difference to Middlesbrough. ‘Sheffield from the train’, wrote H. V. Morton, ‘one of England’s saddest sights.’ Morton was commenting on the city during its smoggiest period shortly after the First World War, and neglected to mention the seven rangy hills that tower over it with menacing beauty.
Under a high sun on FA Cup Third Round day nothing seems sad in Sheffield. Outside the station locals play in steely fountains with the kind of good humour that splashing freezing water on each other somehow brings. Kids roar about and couples kiss. We are all down by the railway station on Sheaf Square. It is so deeply and safely sunken into the valley and so well rejuvenated by New Labour facelift funds that one cannot fail to smile. It is homely, and I feel at home. The search for an alien, uncomfortable England is off to a bad start.
Up on high behind the station, trams slither under the watchful eye of the Park Hill flats, once dreamy ‘streets in the sky’, then harbingers of deprivation, now being re-jigged and resold. Shafted over and over, Sheffield is good at reinventing itself, it seems – clinging to the concrete sides of another tower block on the main hill into town is poet laureate Andrew Motion’s love letter to a city of wild dreams realised. The walls are never boring here, nor the benches. Even the bollards are interesting. No swingeing cuts for architecture’s swinging sixties. Instead they are reborn with quirky imperfection. Sheffield lives on and it doesn’t really care what you think.
Now they reinvent, but once they invented. Sliced bread was one of theirs. So were Liquorice Allsorts. Football, too, Sheffielders would say. By the door of the Top Nails Salon on pretty-bricked Norfolk Street a plaque celebrates Friday 22 March 1889, the day ‘Sheffield United Football Club was born.’ By that year organised football in Sheffield was already middle-aged.
Downhill streets speed me to where homes of football once were. The London Road area is now Sheffield’s mouthy answer to Middlesbrough’s Linthorpe Road. Food, food everywhere. Here you can eat as the Chinese, Mexicans, Japanese, Thai, Greeks or ‘Africans’ don’t really (lemon chicken or cheddar nachos, anyone?). You can also drink within the cosy oaks of the Cremorne, spiritual – and once nigh on literal, so close was one of their early grounds – home of Sheffield Wednesday. This is now Bladeland. Owls enter at your peril. Walk left in the bar and young pup students analyse their Friday night out. Walk right and old men moan for South Yorkshire.
I sit at the bar and let local ale soothe and relax my brain to thoughts of football. How great that in Yorkshire they know how much it matters. How great that George Orwell felt moved to write of a visit:
I happened to be in Yorkshire when Hitler re-occupied the Rhineland. Hitler, Locarno, Fascism and the threat of war aroused hardly a flicker of interest locally, but the decision of the Football Association to stop publishing their fixtures in advance (this was an attempt to quell the football pools) flung all Yorkshire into a storm of fury.
Many football firsts were smelted here. Sheffield took the old game of public schools and animal parts and moulded it into a sport. Then, when they decided to get London suits involved, with the Football Association they brought order and devised competition. Their ‘Sheffield Rules’ – a symptom of typical local otherness – heavily influenced what became the Laws of the Game. To up the sport’s aesthetic appeal, the Sheffield Rules restricted hacking and handling by way of civilisation and allowed forward passes to make the game more attacking. The rules introduced corner flags, umpires, corners, goal kicks, throw-ins, crossbars, the half-time change of ends and the tradition of drawing cup ties from a hat. A Sheffield side taught London how to head the ball during a match at Battersea Park in 1866, much to the amusement of home supporters.
Organisational prowess fed cultural advances. Sheffield Wednesday’s Jimmy Lang became, in 1876, England’s first paid player. To get around the strict codes of amateurism, he was officially a cutler, though he spent his working day reading newspapers and drinking tea at the factory of an Owls committee member. Two years later, the country’s first floodlit match took place at Bramall Lane in front of 20,000 Sheffielders. They loved a novelty match here: in 1879, a Sheffield XI beat the ‘Zulus’ 5-4 in a charity game aimed at raising funds for families orphaned by the South African wars. The Zulu players, it transpired, took not inconsequential fees to play, making them, perhaps, the world’s first professional team. As if that were not enough to inflame the ire of the twenty-first-century humanitarian, the Zulu team comprised a squad of blacked-up locals dressed in beads and feathers and carrying shields. They even went so far as to make up Zulu names (Amaconga, Jiggleumbeano, Dubulamanzi, Umlathooef).
Sheffield also gave us printed fixture lists, football columnists, shin pads and the Saturday night sports newspaper. What bliss the latter used to offer before in-match iPhone updates and post-match screens in pubs, their back pages full of unknown scores, scorers and how many saw them; their front a real-time match report with goalscorers in capitals. Across towns they would be bundled over the arms of portly men in flat caps and sold from pillar to pub. And do you know what I find later, after the game, in a newsagent? Sheffield still bloody has hers, The Green ’Un. Oh yes, this is my England all right.
Sheffield holds numerous ‘oldests’, too. Not far from my barstool is Bramall Lane, home to football since 1862 and therefore the world’s oldest ground. These bumpy streets of red bricks gave birth to Sheffield FC, the world’s oldest football club. Across town is Hallam FC’s Sandygate, the oldest ground in continuous use on earth. When the two young clubs met in that first match at ‘The Lane’ they set out to raise money for ‘cottonopolis’ poverty caused by the American Civil War. Instead, they raised their fists at each other, setting in motion internecine footballing intensities now well into their second century. ‘At one time, it appeared likely that the match would be turned into a general fight’, said the Sheffield Telegraph match report. Hallam’s William Waterfall had run at Sheffield’s Major Creswick ‘in a most irritable manner, and struck him several times. He also threw off his waistcoat and began to “show fight” in earnest.’
In those young days, Sheffield was football’s most fertile territory. It had an unparalleled, embedded playing and supporter culture. That meant early glory years in the Steel City, with not much else since. Between 1896 and 1907, United and Wednesday won four FA Cups and three First Division Championships. More than any other place, Sheffield explains how English football began. In recounting its story, one man who was there explains why it did so.
In 1901, the Blades’ captain and greatest ever player Ernest Needham published ‘Association Football’, a whimsical ninety-page essay on football, the ‘pastime that appears to possess a power that cannot be resisted.’ Needham opined that this ‘healthy and manly recreation’ was a driving force for working-class well-being and sobriety. Football helped the non-playing public too, affecting the mental health of supporters as ‘a wonderful stimulus to those suffering from depressed spirits.’ His was a view displayed often by the Sheffield business families who were intrinsic in the foundation of the city’s football scene; they, after all, could benefit from a healthy, distractedly contented workforce. Yet Needham’s explanation of why football came about extended further. He believed that it met a core need of the English:
It is the true Englishman’s love of danger which, rightly or wrongly, impels him to take part in a pastime in which there is a certain amount of risk; and the more risk, the more eager he is for the fray. It is only the ‘namby-pambies’ who delight in drawing-room games. We should not have heroes as Nelson, Wellington, and many others, if they had not ‘faced the music,’ so to speak. What Englishman with an ounce of pluck will not brave danger?
This was a patriotic game, fuelled by English needs and fuelling the nation’s fighting spirit. The Sheffield Rules had made ‘the game a display of skill, endurance and pluck’ that excited:
... emulation in the breasts of young England. It has been epigrammatically said that ‘Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton.’ If this be true, and no one has ever questioned it, I venture to say that the country owes a vast debt of thanks to all true footballers, for they encourage the old combative spirit that has brought us always safely through, and they are fostering a succeeding generation of manly sporting feeling, and of grand physique. Almost might I say the hope of England is in her footballers.
Such views must not be written off as those of a moustachioed Ripping Yarns archetype, even if Needham played for Michael Palin’s beloved Sheffield United. But, while Sheffield grew the game it was also cultivating a reputation as England’s radical city. A pursuit that could keep steelmakers away from Marx was not to be sniffed at. If it could imbue a love of England and Englishness in them, then all the better.
Needham and the Blades’ cause was abetted by the scintillating football going on at The Lane. In the years leading up to the twentieth century, English greats and ephemeral legends flowed through the place. Bramall Lane was an emporium of our game’s early curios. Arthur Wharton, the first black British player, stopped off briefly on his journey from celebrated goalkeeper to a pauper’s grave via syphilis. Wharton left before the collier triumvirate of Needham, Rab Howell and William Foulke led United to a title win in 1899.
Howell remains England’s only gypsy international. A tiny right-half famed for playing without socks, Howell grew up in his tinker father’s caravan close to where Meadowhall now hovers. When he was sold to Liverpool, goes the story, he simply hitched his caravan to a horse and scrambled across the Pennines. On the pages of a match programme published in the Blades’ championship-winning year, Howell was described by a journalist as ‘the happiest-go-lucky individual it has ever been my lot to run shoulders against’. ‘Well, I am no chicken although I look like a lad,’ said Howell, ‘but I shall play a lot longer than most of them. You see, I never drink. I think I am thirty next.’
Howell weighed in at under ten stone. His goalkeeper William ‘Fatty’ Foulke is remembered for being double that weight, a real shame given his sporting aptitude. He did little to discourage the cult of caveman constructed around him. In one team photo, Foulke poses in apparent 3D, twice the size of everyone else in the squad. He displays the menace of a simple-but-strong film criminal who stands behind his mastermind boss and occasionally lifts people up by the throat. Foulke even seems to be sucking his own eyes in to make them more deep-set. The goalkeeper drank and ate with predictable aplomb, wolfing on one occasion the breakfasts of his ten teammates before they awoke. When playing, he was fond of hanging from the crossbar or lifting opposition forwards by their lapels and supporters by their ankles. Yet Foulke was also fond of making saves and leaping about his area, a colossus in every way. He even played first-class cricket for Derbyshire.
Foulke, Howell, Needham: what times in Sheffield, football’s fatherland. What cheer when they brought the league championship home in 1899. All season, those inclined to red stripes had rallied behind their Blades in high numbers, home and away. As trains snaked out of South Yorkshire they sang their way across the country. One thousand at Goodison, where the Scousers pelted Foulke with stones, each bouncing off his girth. Sticks and stones. Two thousand at Notts County – the sport was young, but you could sniff history in the air. Women did not miss out. Already they saw the home games (season ticket admitting ‘Self and Lady’ in the John Street Stand = 21/-), but now they too went on the run and they too bought hats and scarves in Coles department store.
After the league was won United kept on going, for red Sheffield and for football. In four years, three FA Cup finals and once runners-up in the league. They kept on going when others thought perhaps they should not have, playing in the ‘Khaki Cup Final’ of 1915 as the sons of England headed off to Ypres, Somme and death. The Sheffield Morning Telegraph said United had brought shame upon the city. Thousands of Sheffield Pals battalion members were at the match, 513 died within a year. When the FA Cup trophy was collected for the final time, in 1925, United again brought national heartache to the agenda. Thirteen years earlier, goalkeeper Charles Sutcliffe had missed his sailing on the good ship Titanic due to flu. In the Second World War, Sutcliffe lost his winner’s medal while sandbagging.
And then ... nothing. Nothing as the homes of football multiplied. By my 1981 anchor, United were missing presumed dead. Martin Peters had guided them into Division Four, a hero of England felled in Sheffield. Uneasy relationships between a steel-owning board (the chairman was a Tory! In Sheffield!) and out-of-steel-work supporters held. They chanted their support of the miners, but now of manager Ian Porterfield too. The Tory chairman knew all about club and community, and did what he could to bring the two on to speaking terms. Nothing, though, melted hearts like the goals of Keith Edwards. Brilliant, boyish, arrogant and, oddly, born on Teeside of ICI stock, but missed by my own imploding club. Forty-two goals from Edwards, ninety-six points from the team. Champions. Champions again.
The peace was volatile and challenged by rioting, political and otherwise. The Blades Business Crew, purveyors of casual violence (but they were well dressed! They never hit normal fans!) owned the streets – these streets I stroll down today.
After the terraces that bricked over football’s maternity wings, the main stand of Bramall Lane hovers into view. Like the Park Lane flats, it is a Soviet masterpiece of concrete – brutalism with a club shop. Pillars rise above its roof like stretched gravestones and random bits of window prod outwards. The mind expects antiquity and the eyes receive a poke. The here and now is brought even closer by banner images on each car park lamppost of a tragically deceased former Blades manager. Five weeks before my visit today, Gary Speed was found hanged in his garage. So quickly does football go from history and mattering to frippery and not.
On the game rolls. On and on. The Magic of the Cup is in town. Part-time visitors Salisbury City are here in the ancient home of football. They have borrowed Swindon Town’s team coach for the forage north. There it sits by the Legends of the Lane Lounge, squeezed in front of a St John Ambulance. City fans loiter and take pictures of the Soviet stand. Two thousand are here from Salisbury today. They don’t often get half that at home. Full-timers will be shaking their heads as they queue and employing particularly obscure chants to alienate the Johnny Come Latelys. Eventually and secretly they will love the way the city has got behind their City. Yesterday, the press handcar trundled into town. Chairman William Harrison-Allan (there’s a proper chairman’s name) said it all: ‘The formation against Sheffield will be 9-0-1 I expect, but it’s great fun ... I’d love a draw against Sheffield United – you wouldn’t need to get me a car to go home, I’d run down the M1.’ Eighty-four rungs on England’s ladder separate the two clubs, but we all know that this sport is for dreaming.
In the ticket office queue, I take in local sounds. There are ‘reights’ and ‘nowts’ and dialogues about a recent signing’s arse size. Everyone seems to pronounce Salisbury ‘Salsbury’, as if elongating the ‘a’ would compromise their Yorkshireness. The Soviet stand is officially called the GAC Stand. ‘What’s GAC, mate?’ I ask a steward. ‘Not a clue, pal. I’m from Barnsley.’
Scattered flowers on the grass verge up to the Kop are part of the Sheffield United Memorial Garden. ‘To Our Dad’, most of them read, or ‘To Our Dad, The True Blade’. Their cellophane flutters in the wind and people stop to remember. Some probably imagine that one day there will be flowers for them here too. It is where they want to be, where they belong, in life and death.
The electric turnstiles bleep us in, a mass of denim and Christmas gift hats. A shabby, but modern sign, aged perhaps with tea like an infant’s treasure map, offers welcome to ‘The World’s Oldest Professional Football Ground’. I peep through to the empty Kop, closed today due to the small attendance anticipated, but still atmospheric, ominous and mighty. People sneak in a crafty fag then run up to their seats to sing about cigarettes. The music strikes up but is, brilliantly, cut in time for an entirely arisen home end to belt out their anthem:
You fill up my senses
Like a gallon of Magnet
Like a packet of Woodbines
Like a good pinch of snuff
Like a night out in Sheffield
Like a greasy chip butty
Like Sheffield United
Come thrill me again
The tune is John Denver’s ‘You Fill Up My Senses’, though his lyrics feature forests, mountains, springtime and a calm azure sea. I prefer the Sheffield depiction of life’s pleasures. It speaks of a northern hedonism that I like about England, as compared to, say, an American’s slightly spiritual and wholesome devotion to open air and space.
The choir sits and leaves Bramall Lane itself to exude atmosphere. Whatever the architectural butchery outside, sitting here and looking at this age-old pretty green is a rush. For so long, people have played and watched sport here, not only football but also cricket, and even baseball. Several generations have come to escape real life, all of them looking in the same direction. That continuity breeds a sense of belonging whomever you support. Ultimately, we as football fans share the pleasure and the pain of our game. It is a key part of our own version of England. As there are so many of us, it is a key part of England as a whole, too.
Bramall Lane is an all-seater stadium, but alongside heritage it still has enough rough edges and oddities to be special. Giant crutches keep the Kop roof in place, and other scattered pillars make for a communal experience of thousands craning their necks at once, a tennis crowd only with more use of the word ‘shite’. It is also unfailingly, blaringly red, from those pillars to seats, walls and roofs. Dusky in-ground lights bounce off surfaces and enhance the feeling that you are part of a bonfire in a skip.
Our FA Cup Third Round begins. Teenagers around me discuss their real preoccupation: the Football Manager computer game. One has even signed Messi for the Blades (‘But I’ve still kept Chris Morgan’). ‘Two pound yer programmes,’ squawks a man in a bright coat walking up and down the stand’s steps. ‘Two pound yer matchday programmes. Just two pound. Two quid.’ At this point, one in two males in the vicinity howl variations of the question, ‘How much did you say they were, mate?’ We are all highly unoriginal. We all think we were the first bloke to go into Poundland, pick up an item and say ‘How much is this, love?’
The Salisbury fans – far away in the low-ceilinged away end – make disjointed noise. Around forty of them sit separately from the main body of supporters, and I wonder if these are the regulars, sat apart in their morally superior ghetto. We all see the same game of kick-and-rush, clear and dart. Every now and again, the Blades remember how easy football can be and pass their way to superiority. Against such relatively unfit opposition, it is a rare chance to be easily the best lad in the playground. A throw-in allows time to notice the two advertising hoardings facing me. One is for Fantasy Island, Lincolnshire’s premier family theme park. The other is for the Samaritans.
When my neighbours turn to the real world they have a surprisingly good line in old-fashioned ‘dad at football’ speak. ‘’e runs like ’e’s got a Farmfoods freezer on his back. Ay! Farmfoods! ’Urry up.’ Eighteen minutes in, a United goal interrupts the pursuit of low-end supermarket-based abuse. Salisbury retaliate by entering the United half for the first time. They remember how to make runs and angles for each other, and even how to pass. Corner-kicks are eked out of nothing and the City followers arise and yearn. One corner acts as a summary of the rest, outswinging as it does with absolutely no adherence to the basic laws of trigonometry, and starting a home attack.
The sharp-tongued teen next to me appears to have a favourite boo boy too. The victim seems like an able enough full-back to me, and if nothing else is the first Haitian international I have ever seen in action. Yet to teenboy he is hilarious. It actually crosses into nastiness, though I don’t think racial, and I ponder again the anger of youth as witnessed at the Riverside.
Half-time brings a tight squeeze into the stand’s contracted stomach. Old men in possession of classic Yorkshire Jaws parade up and down the end of each queue for food and drink tutting and shaking their heads. This is their stand. Their concourse. Just who are these interlopers? Those that do make the finish line can choose a Steak and Stone’s Bitter Pie. There is character and Hatters Railwaymen and region to be spotted in football ground catering, which surprises and pleases me. In these little ways can we keep our corners of England familiar and particular, should we wish to.
When the second period gets underway, Salisbury tear into United and dash about like purposeful sheepdogs. United retort by sending on their ex-England centre-forward, now large of breast, but still full of huff and puff. He scurries around effectively, a titan among plodding ogres. A City midfielder takes umbrage and jackknifes his opponent, a scalp to tell his mates about. Unfortunately, it is like taking cheesewire to a steak, and the forward gallops away. ‘Who are ya?’ sing the United men.
Their team make it 2-0 when the teenager’s Haitian bête noir and another beanstalk forward combine to force an own goal. The City defender who plunges the ball in is guilty only of trying too hard. The same forward later bundles the keeper into his net, ball and all, though the Sheffield Rules rule no longer and the tally remains at two. Today he is a hero. By the season’s end he is in prison for rape. Frequently, the ball balloons, pings and pinballs about the City box as tired legs push clearances on to clumsy knees. Eventually, the future jailbird coerces another own goal. Shortly afterwards, the previously silent man three seats to my left darts out like a tracksuited jack-in-a-box and hurls a quite incredible string of abuse at the linesman. It is ferocious and pent-up, as if the two are old friends and my neighbour has been holding something back since 1987. Meanwhile, my younger surrounding comrades are now fixed to their iPhone screens, no Green ’Uns for them tonight.
Towards the end Salisbury score the goal of the game, a thumped effort from distance. The City roar is strident but regretful. For a few minutes their team pile forward inspired by a floppy-locked substitute, a rock star of a footballer. Could his be the story? Maybe, just maybe. Then the whistle goes. A 3-1 loss. The first city of football claps the Salisbury yellows from the pitch. If only, if only.
I walk back into the black Sheffield night. The tram up to Jarvis Cocker’s place is empty and seems to have the voice of Sean Bean. Sheffield is glammed up tonight. She glints terrifically as we rise through hilly housing estates, a flickering mass with no perceptible end. I walk from Manor Top along Mansfield Road to Intake, where Cocker spent his youth. Cocker is important to Sheffield’s story because music is, but he is also important to England’s. It is, after all, one of the great stereotypes of our nation that it produces eccentrics, though they usually have to be of a certain social class to attain the label. I pass a model railway shop and then Intake Fish and Chips. Intake is not quite inner-city Sheffield, but not quite leafy suburb. It seems to be on the frontier boundary between working-class city and factory-owning country.
Cocker’s old place is badly lit, large and set back from the road behind high bushes and bulky walls. As the trees lazily sway in the winter wind the house has an arch creepiness to it, as does the smoggy limestone Methodist Church next door. Turn left on the main road at the house’s front and you find Sheffield. Turn right, it’s the south, escape, and stardom. The shops that nuzzle Cocker’s old home are, in their names, aptly wry and faintly Royston Vasey. There is Short ’n’ Curlies hairdresser, ‘air Barbers, A&E News and Snakes & Adders – ‘The Right Lifestyle For Your Reptile’. Not all of them can have been here when Cocker was, but they still help explain him, Sheffield, his, and to an extent my England.
After two decades of struggle, Cocker’s band sprung on to the national consciousness in the mid-1990s, Michael Jackson’s warts and all. Theirs was an England of bus shelter sex and happenings in town parks. As much as anything Pulp created English fiction and characters rather than singing truths, whether in their songs or their personas; a local criticism of Cocker’s ‘Common People’ lyric was how fabricated it all was given the sizeable house in front of me tonight, and his somewhat bourgeois upbringing (siblings named Jarvis and Saskia, anyone?). But imagined or not, its template was of an England not completely unrecognisable to me. As Cocker told Select magazine, it was a country of ‘chips, the Peak District and cul-de-sacs.’
Across from the Cocker house I enter The Ball Inn. It is a large black and tan mansion of a pub, and surely the place to garner proud local tales of its former neighbour. Conversation above the jukebox is, though, impossible. I sit by a man feeding his baby dry roasted peanuts and sup up quickly. At the bus stop a dolled-up woman in her fifties tells me that this is a fantastic place to get the bus ‘because they’re all eight minutes apart, just enough time to bob in the chippy for a portion.’ The 42 fills up as we head from high on Cocker hill down into town. Saturday night is here. ‘Single into town’, says each passenger that boards. Aftershave boxes perfume for attention.
I alight at Haymarket in search of music. It matters here. It’s not quite football, but it matters. The story is well worn: Joe Cocker, the New Wave movement (Human League were Number One on the day I was born), Pulp, Richard Hawley, Arctic Monkeys ... All are resolutely Sheffield (the wryness, the quiet assuredness) and resolutely England (the peculiar sounds, the particular lyrics). They are the Sheffield poets who have often determined how their city is seen and the international artists taking their England to the world. I walk by the Boardwalk, where The Clash made their debut supporting The Sex Pistols. It is now boarded up and for sale, fly posters masking its spit-stained walls.
I walk to Coles Corner, title of a Richard Hawley album and according to him a major reproductive organ:
Sheffield’s couples, lovers, friends, mums or dads or whatever, would meet there. I’ve always found it quite a romantic notion – how many kids in Sheffield are knocking about as a result of a meeting at Coles Corner?
Coles department store is gone now. Gone are the matchmakings. Gone too is the sports section where those United fans of yore bought red and white things for forays afar. Down a dark street The Grapes glows golden. Here the Arctic Monkeys played for the first time. I settle by a fire in the snug and listen to a man describe Huddersfield Town striker Jordan Rhodes as ‘the Clive Allen of League One’. He is sat among work colleagues for whom football is a recurring conversational topic, despite the efforts of the only woman present. This is not a sexist thing; she seems determined to change the subject to terminal diseases, and no one is really up for that on a Saturday night.
Back in the Saturday night streets of Sheffield I look for legendary home of synth pop, The Limit. I reckon it must have been just about where Nando’s now stands. Furiously reacting to this steamrollering of England’s cultural prestige, and as an ardent anti-chain restaurant socialist who regularly moans about the crass homogenisation of Britain’s high streets, I take the only option left to me. My half chicken, rice and chips, washed down with a glass of house red, is delicious.
I sit, the man alone in a chain restaurant with nothing for company but a plastic bag containing Haribo sweets and a local paper. My window perch makes for widescreen HD viewing as a Saturday night unfolds. Everywhere outside there is flesh and laughter. Sheffield is smiling at itself, all preened and up for it. The police get kisses.
On the next table to mine a real gone kid of a drunk refuses to drink water when offered by his girlfriend, and then launches into a tirade about her friends. Student flatmates embark upon the early stages of an argument that I predict will sprout and last long into the morning. ‘No, no, NO. Look, Tom. What about those case studies. Those fucking case studies.’ Ah Nando’s, or to its friends, ‘middle-class McDonald’s’.
Outside, waiting for the tram, there is undoubtedly an amiable feel to proceedings. Drunks even stumble politely. Lasses slur and giggle the night away. A scruffily dapper young lad who is probably in a minor indie band takes an old gal by the arm: ‘Come on, my love. Just me and you on the Costa del Sheffield.’ A fat woman somehow trips up on a lamppost and dissolves into a guffawed chant of ‘I’m from Chesterfield. I’M FROM CHESTERFIELD.’ It is not the Saturday night of Bravo TV documentaries showing sick-strewn streets run by spitting, spoiling lads. It is one of exuberance and gentle hedonism. Like a gallon of Magnet. Like a packet of Woodbines.
Breakfast in the Hillsborough Hotel. A cider expert from the Campaign for Real Ale inspects his condiments and slurps tea. I take my table behind him and am soon eating a gloriously English breakfast. Henderson’s Relish, ‘The Yorkshire Sauce’, seems like a fitting accompaniment. It is only available round here and Sheffielders are rightly proud of its cheekily spicy ways. For over a hundred years it has spiced up dull fare and been mopped up by post-fish and chips slices of soapy white bread. CAMRA man is having none of it, bathing his plate in HP Sauce, a clear outsider.
He is here because The Hillsborough, a prepossessing Victorian pub and inn, is on Sheffield’s real ale circuit. From miles people pile into the city to tour twelve designated pubs by tram, friendly Hillsborough owners Helen and Andrew tell me. Many are young. Indeed, many real ale brewers these days are young. What a surprising turn of events, that local bitter should become a trend with the achingly Guardianista name of ‘craft beer’. That is certainly something fresh about this England I am returning to. It is neither a small quirk nor a fad, and comprises one of very few native industries on the upturn. The microbreweries and beers, in their names and labels, usually tap into a cherished slice of England local to them. A pint of bitter, then, is a nourishing beacon of identity; drink rivers full, for you are preserving what makes us.
Regretting not being quite alcoholic enough to have one last pint of Hillsborough ale at 9.30 a.m. on a Sunday, I bid Helen and Andrew goodbye and head for the tram. ‘Two pounds ten please, love’, says the male conductor. I had forgotten this was supposed to be true of Sheffield, that men called men ‘love’. May that never die out. This method of transport is key to making this city the social, approachable place it is. Cars are banned from so many streets, so life has not been privatised.
Scotland seems to be pursuing me today. The newspapers contain more ramblings of independence, and the man stood over me on the tram delights in giving his view to a travel companion and anyone else within unlucky earshot: ‘Let ’em go. It’ll get rid of the chip on their shoulders, bloody Jocks.’
This morning, with trams clacking about underneath Park Hill flats and a Sheffield Wednesday-blue sky, it feels like a vibrant post-Communist central European city. All it needs now is Ryanair flights and the stags and hens will swamp in. The city is by no means artistically beautiful, but she is captivating and I can’t keep my eyes off her. She has an air, a buzz of things happening, of people getting on with each other and with life, whatever is thrown at them. The landscape helps – to be pitted at the drop of a valley like this makes the place insular and conceitedly riveting. Sheffield is in its own world, a great English republic.
Down bonny lanes and ginnels I walk to Paradise Square, occasionally tripping over empty bottles of WKD from last night. I take that back about Sheffield not being a comely lass – the square is a gem. Cobbles and old gas lampposts are surrounded on all four sides by adjoined high and handsome Georgian houses. It is, naturally, hilly, a sharp curve running from top to bottom, a dishy face clinging to a crooked body. The square is silent today; save for birdsong, bells and some Auto Windscreen repair men sawing glass. Most of the buildings are now occupied by law firms and accountants. One is a retirement and investment planning company, which seems far too long-term and un-hedonistic for Sheffield. These walls, however, whisper rebellion and revolution. On a picnic bench between numbers seven and nine I sit and read accounts of when 20,000 people gathered here in the name of Chartism.
Sheffield had been a centre of English radicalism long before the Chartists took root: 50,000 protested against Manchester’s Peterloo Massacre, and when the military demanded ‘God Save the King’ be sung in theatres, audiences jeered their way through renditions. The people of Sheffield did not like any authority but their own. In 1837 they formed a Working Men’s Association. A Female Radical Association that thought hard and fought hard came soon after. Both groups quickly became involved with the Chartist cause, led in Sheffield by Samuel Holberry. Though only in his twenties, Holberry inspired a campaign of church occupations and firebombing. Thousands supported him and gathered frequently here at Paradise Square to roar for social change. In January 1840, Holberry plotted with Chartist leaders in neighbouring towns to begin a revolution that would spread outwards. But the plotters had a traitor in their midst, and as their scheme got underway soldiers swooped. Holberry was sentenced to four years in prison. After a constructed campaign of ill treatment he died, aged twenty-eight, of consumption.
Successfully suppressed, Chartism withered. Sheffield’s rebellious streak found different channels. Trade unions were of constant, over-arching importance, and gave others the confidence to rebel. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, various rambling groups asserted and exercised their right to roam, most famously at Kinder Scout. These were often impoverished steelworkers who regarded the surrounding Peak District as their playground. In 1851, the Sheffield Female Political Association held its inaugural meeting. It was the first Suffrage group in England. (Take that London feminists, says Sheffield; take that Pankhursts over the Pennines.) Sixty years on, Sheffield women were still fighting for their liberty and fraternity. In 1911, twenty-one-year-old Molly Morris took charge of the local Suffragettes. Molly chalked the streets, fundraised, spoke at meetings and blew up postboxes. Violent, perhaps, but by 1929 Sheffield had elected ten female Councillors. Molly would later marry Jack Murphy, a Sheffield trade union and Communist Party behemoth. Together, the two travelled to Moscow following the Soviet revolution to meet with Lenin and his cabinet.
While the Communist Party had significant support in Sheffield, it was Labour who came to dominate city politics. Throughout the 1980s, the city repeatedly showed Thatcherism the back of its hand. Under the tutelage of, remarkably it seems now, David Blunkett, the Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire installed its own economic system to save the steel industry she at Number Ten sought to kill. They hoisted the Red Flag over the town hall and declared the city a nuclear-free zone. Even the buses cost nigh on nowt. When Maggie visited, it took 1,000 batoned boys in blue to keep the mob off. National authorities and agendas won in the end, but by ’eck what a fist they gave it here.
A hulking jeep pulls up and parks next to me in today’s Paradise. Its driver, a man in a Barbour jacket and khaki chords, beeps the beast locked and leaves her to sweat, tick and cool. My wistful bench reading is over. Back by the cathedral, which teeters on the more depressing side of Gothic, if that’s possible, an occupation is underway. A tented community has taken up residence in the square outside. ‘If not us – Who? If not now – When?’ reads one of their many signs. Given the Chartists’ penchant for being church nuisances and displaying such catchy slogans, could this be a re-creation, the left-wing version of those blokes who on a weekend dress up and run about in potato fields pretending to be Yorkists? The cathedral bells shake the ground and smoke out the tent dwellers. Bearded men and attractive nose-studded women emerge, yawn and smile. Another day and the world still needs saving. These folk are members of the Occupy movement, an organic protest group that refuses to let rapacious capital off free. They, too, are heirs of both the Sheffield Chartist tradition and the English radical tradition of trespassing or camping on stuff to make a point. Their presence here cheers my Sunday morning no end. Still we protest in England, still there are people that defy agenda and apathy to make a stand.
As I am reading an article on the side of their main tent about Wayne Rooney entitled ‘£10m a Year for Kicking a Ball – This Can’t Be Right’, a drunk intrudes the camp. He sings the Mamas and Papas’ ‘California Dreamin’’ and then announces his intention to burn the church down on behalf of the protestors who are, apparently, ‘sound lads’. The campers engage politely with the drunk to remind him that theirs is an alcohol-free zone. Marvellously, he shakes hands, apologises and then parks himself down next to the camp fence to finish his bottle of cider.
I continue on to the Peace Gardens, apt after that fine display of conflict avoidance. Water laps down cascading fountains dedicated to Samuel Holberry. The gardens, more a calming civic square, are overlooked by Sheffield Town Hall, which resembles an officious stately home with a clock tower. Once again families stamp cold water on to one another and fill the tongue-tied air with giggles. I continue through the Winter Gardens, a giant oval percolating clammy air. There are more gigglers, here: nervous young daters, old-time couples laughing over the same stories retold. Determined businesswomen set up their infant enterprises that sell sandwiches and, of course, cupcakes. Is England becoming a nation of beer and sponge? I hope so. We are virtuous, Mr Shakespeare, but we want our cakes and ale.
Via contented landscape gardens lapping at two theatres and the giant car battery sticklebrick that is Sheffield Hallam University, I arrive back by the station and endure a severe attack of dreamy goosebumps. Sheffield has done that to me. The trigger now is a wall poem I had missed yesterday by the Bard of Barnsley, Ian McMillan. ‘The passenger now leaving platform five,’ it begins, ‘arrives in a place of shining steel/And it makes that passenger glad to be alive.’
There is just something about Sheffield, and therefore this England. The architecture is mixed and sometimes ugly, but its situation takes one’s focus away from that. ‘A dirty picture in a golden frame’ said local resident John Ruskin. But as well as its bonhomie and welcome, it is the city’s resilience that I am particularly taken by. Because where post-industrial towns like Middlesbrough seem to have given up, Sheffield has not. It has retained industry where possible, but failed to mope when those forces no one asked for made it impossible. Give them a monstrous 1960s tower block, and the people paint it pink and call it a cultural centre. Don’t believe me? Sheffield now has the most artist studios of any place outside London. No one has given up. Indeed, even this current recession doesn’t seem to be biting, perhaps because, as one man in the Cremorne told me, ‘We had nowt in the first place’. There is a happiness about the place – that Woodbine hedonism – that does not scream like there is no tomorrow in a Mancunian way, but has a cracking night out while it can. It is the contentedness of rain on a tent roof rather than champagne and dancing. No one is grinning ear to ear, but they are smirking that nature has given them these hills and this city. The wit is sharp but not sardonic or cynical.
There is enterprise in Sheffield. It is Our England, modified. Think of Chartism as the Occupy protest, the Park Hill rejuvenation, or, even, Jarvis Cocker inspiring the Arctic Monkeys. History and the present are interwoven; how good England was and can be, instead of bemoaning the state of things. I am contractually obliged to write it, but football was vital to this. Playing such a role in its invention and early growth created an ethos among Sheffielders – conscious or otherwise – that what they said mattered, and that their actions could change England. That optimism is retained in the way the city is today. This England I have come across resembles the highest ideal I built in my Caledonian exile. Next stop, Luton.