Sheffield
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Culture and attractions
7.2% of Sheffield's working population are employed in the creative industries, well above the national average of 4%. Open Up Sheffield is an annual event over the first two weekends in May where local visual artists and fine craft workers invite the public to their studios and other venues.
Music
Sheffield has been the home of several well-known bands and musicians, with an unusually large number of synth pop and other electronic outfits hailing from there. These include The Human League, Heaven 17, ABC, the Thompson Twins, Wavestar, and the more industrially inclined Cabaret Voltaire and Clock DVA. This electronic tradition has continued: techno label Warp Records was a central pillar of the Yorkshire Bleeps and Bass scene of the early 1990s, and has gone on to become one of Britain's oldest and best-loved dance music labels. There was a thriving goa trance scene in the early 1990s. Moloko and Autechre, one of the leading lights of so-called intelligent dance music, are also based in Sheffield. More recently, other popular genres of electronic music such as bassline house have originated in the city. Sheffield is home to a number of high-profile nightclubs – Gatecrasher One was one of the most popular nightclubs in the north of England until its destruction in a fire on 18 June 2007.
Sheffield has also seen the birth of many popular bands, including Arctic Monkeys, Pulp, Def Leppard, Joe Cocker, Richard Hawley, The Longpigs, Milburn, The Long Blondes, Reverend and the Makers, 65daysofstatic, Bring Me the Horizon, Comsat Angels, thisGIRL, Derek Bailey, Little Man Tate, and Tony Oxley. 1998 Mercury Music Prize award winners Gomez are also connected to Sheffield, as some of the founding members went to Sheffield University. Along with many other popular and alternative musicians, the city is the base for a well developed and thriving unsigned music scene.
The Arctic Monkeys are particularly notable for their heavy use of a Sheffield accent in their songs. Hailing from the High Green suburb, their lyrics are often sung in a Yorkshire dialect and contain references to local places such as Rotherham, Hunter's Bar, Hillsborough and Shiregreen. They were one of several indie bands to emerge from the city as part of the New Yorkshire movement.
The city's ties with music were acknowledged in 1999, when the National Centre for Popular Music, a museum dedicated to the subject of popular music, was opened. It was not as successful as was hoped, however, and later evolved to become a live music venue; then in February 2005, the unusual steel-covered building became the students' union for Sheffield Hallam University. Live music venues in the city include the Leadmill, Corporation, the Boardwalk, the Plug, the City Hall, the University of Sheffield, the Studio Theatre at the Crucible Theatre, The Frog & Parrot, The Harley and The Grapes. A new venue, Carling Academy Sheffield opened in April 2008.
Sheffield has a number of local orchestras and choirs. Notable orchestras including the Hallam Sinfonia, Sheffield Symphony Orchestra, the Sheffield Chamber Orchestra, the Sheffield Philharmonic Orchestra and the City of Sheffield Youth Orchestra. Choirs in Sheffield include Sheffield Philharmonic Chorus, Sheffield Bach Society, Sheffield Cathedral Choir and Sheffield Oratorio Chorus. The city is also home to a strong brass band tradition, with bands associated with factories and villages.
Attractions
Sheffield has two major theatres, the Lyceum Theatre and the Crucible Theatre, which together with the smaller Studio Theatre make up the largest theatre complex outside London. There are four major art galleries, including the modern Millennium Galleries and the Site Gallery, which specialises in multimedia. The Sheffield Walk of Fame in the City Centre honours famous Sheffielders like the Hollywood version.
The Sheffield Arena is located in the Don Valley area just outside the city centre and it is one of the major arenas in the UK hosting big music acts of the world.
Valley Centertainment is an entertainment park on the outskirts of the city centre and features Cineworld Cinemas, Hollywood Bowl and lots of restaurants and bars. It is located next to the Sheffield Arena and Meadowhall shopping centre.
The city also has a number of other attractions such as the Sheffield Winter Gardens and the Peace Gardens. The Botanical Gardens recently underwent a £6.7-million-pound restoration. There is also a city farm at Heeley City Farm and a second animal collection in Graves Park that is open to the public. The city also has several museums, including the Weston Park Museum, the Kelham Island Museum, the Sheffield Fire and Police Museum, Abbeydale Industrial Hamlet and Shepherd Wheel. Victoria Quays is also a popular canal-side leisure and office quarter.
There are about 1,000 listed buildings in Sheffield (including the whole of the Sheffield postal district). Of these, only five are Grade I listed. 42 are Grade II*, the rest being Grade II listed. Compared with other English cities Sheffield has few Grade I buildings. Liverpool, for example, has 26 Grade I listed buildings. This situation led the noted architecture historian Nikolaus Pevsner, writing in 1959, to comment that the city was "architecturally a miserable disappointment" with no pre-19th century buildings of any distinction. By contrast, in November 2007, Sheffield's Peace and Winter Gardens beat London's South Bank to gain the Royal Institute of British Architects' Academy of Urbanism "Great Place" Award, as an "outstanding example of how cities can be improved, to make urban spaces as attractive and accessible as possible".
The city has many large parks such as Millhouses Park, Endcliffe Park and Graves Park.
Large parts of the city are designated as sites of special scientific interest (areas of land which the British Government considers to be of special interest by virtue of its fauna, flora, geological or physiographical features) including several urban areas.
Media and film
The films The Full Monty, Threads, When Saturday Comes and Whatever Happened to Harold Smith? were based in the city. F.I.S.T. also included several scenes filmed in Sheffield. Besides the story of The History Boys is set in Sheffield at Cutler's Grammar School. Sheffield's daily newspaper is the Sheffield Star, complemented by the weekly Sheffield Telegraph. Sheffield also has many free publications such as Sandman, Go Sheffield, Exposed, Clunge, Radio Coma and Now Then. The BBC's Radio Sheffield and the independent Hallam FM and sister station Magic AM broadcast to the city. The Sheffield International Documentary Festival, the UK's leading documentary festival, has been run annually since 1994 at the Showroom Cinema. The annual Lovebytes digital arts festival takes place in Sheffield across a variety of venues. A song by The Clash (who played their first ever gig in Sheffield at the Black Swan – now known as The Boardwalk), titled "This Is England" features the lyric: "This is England / This knife of Sheffield steel / This is England / This is how we feel." Sheffield hosted the Awards of the International Indian Film Academy in 2007 which was a big success and raised awareness of global warming by having an unconventional green carpet. Internationally recognised design agency The Designers Republic is based in Sheffield, as well as Universal Everything, Tado and Dust.
Education
Sheffield has two universities, the University of Sheffield and Sheffield Hallam University. The two combined bring 55,000 students to the city every year, including many from the Far East. As a result of its large student population, Sheffield has many bars, cafes, clubs and shops as well as student housing to accommodate them.
Sheffield has two further education colleges. Sheffield College is organised on a collegiate basis and was originally created from the merger of six colleges around the city, since reduced to just four: City (formerly Castle) in the city centre, Hillsborough, Crystal Peaks on the outskirts and Norton, each operating as semi-autonomous constituents of Sheffield College. Longley Park Sixth Form College, managed by the Local Education Authority opened in 2004.
There are also 141 primary schools and 27 secondary schools - of which seven have sixth forms, and also a special separate sixth-form college, Longley Park Sixth Form College. There are also seven private schools, most notably Birkdale School and the Sheffield High School for Girls.
