Savile Town Marina, Dewsbury, South Yorkshire

The Chauffeur was keen to return to Sheffield to see that everything we had missed on Sunday, and I was happy to go along with the plan. We travelled south down the M1 as we had two days ago, today the mist more mirk and would have arrived before 9.30 am had we entered the city on the same pre-travelled route, but Tomtom had different ideas today. She took us through the centre of the old heavy industrial part of the city, slow with traffic lights and early morning traffic, and little beauty to lift the mood. We found ourselves in a strange little spot that turned out to be across the tramway and some distance by car from the Park & Ride we were seeking.

By the time we arrived in the city centre, the Visitor Centre was open, although the art gallery not yet. We withdrew to the library and I was over fifty pages into a Large Print version of an Oscar Wilde play when Chris found me and suggested we relocate to the Art Gallery.

The Central Library and Graves Gallery on the third floor, was opened in 1934, a state of art facility with heating, artificial ventilation and five lifts, built with the support of business man John George Graves, who made his fortunes out of the one of the country’s earliest mail order business, first selling watches and then a wide variety of goods. He also gifted almost seven hundred paintings to kick start the collection. Today there are many fine works hanging in the gallery including those by Walter Sickert, Stanley Spencer, Paul Nash, L S Lowry, Burne-Jones, William Blake,  just to mention a few artists with whose names I am familiar. A massive work by the very weird Grayson Perry, an eight metre tapestry representing the “comfort blanket of Britain” impressed me greatly. Actually I have seen some wonderful work by this cross-dressing oddball, which goes to show you shouldn’t form opinions based solely on a person’s appearance.  There are several galleries filled with very modern work, of the kind that leaves both of us cold and which can be passed through at regular walking pace. We thought the size of the gallery rather poor given the size of the city, particularly given its generous seed collection and had thought it would hold our attention for longer. 

We lunched in the lovely Winter Gardens, then set off to various points of the centre to explore significant buildings we had missed out on Sunday. The first was the City Hall, Yorkshire’s premier music venue and conference centre. This Grade II listed building was designed in 1920 but not completed until 1932, the construction delay due to financial constraints. Its a neo-classical building with a giant portico and the largest hall in the building, the Oval Hall, seats 2,271 people. The Grand Willis III Organ is the largest in Sheffield with over 4,000 pipes and four manuals, however we saw none of this only able to see the booking hall which in itself is quite lovely.

The second was the Town Hall, completed in 1897 and extended in 1923, which is used by the Sheffield City Council and not open to the public. We did poke our nose into the foyer and ask the customer relations officer if we could look around; we were allowed only in the Main Entrance Hall where we were able to admire the grand marble staircase and the wonderful wall friezes.

The Cutler’s Hall, an imposing building built in 1832, also Grade II listed, is the third metamorphosis of the headquarters of the Company of Cutlers in Hallamshire, incorporated by an Act of Parliament in 1624 and in 1638, to regulate the industry of the cutlery trade. We were stopped at the front door by a stern chap who obviously had appointed himself the gatekeeper . Today the building is used for many of the grandest events in the city’s civic and commercial life of the city, and is not open to casual visitors such as ourselves. 

From here we set off down the hill from the centre of the city in search of the Victoria Quays, which had caught our attention from the tram. Alas this glimpse promised more than the reality, so we spent most of our time around the waterways walking the towpaths and along the river.

Sheffield’s canal basin was opened in 1819 as the terminus for the Sheffield and Tinsley Canal, this fulfilling a long held ambition to connect Sheffield to the sea via the Trent and Humber. Even by 1848 the canal was being replaced by the railway, and over the intervening years the area slid into decline, although some commercial use was made of the area until the early 1970s.

For over twenty years large scale developers put forward comprehensive proposals for the total twenty acre site, but no start was made; difficult market conditions and the derelict state of the buildings the main obstacles. Then in 1992 the Sheffield Development Corporation, helped by British Waterways, adopted a new approach in which the site was broken down into smaller more manageable development parcels, with appropriate solutions then being sought for each part. The site was renamed Victoria Quays at that time, due to its proximity to the former Victoria Railway Station. However, even though publicity and guides suggest that the area is now a hive of business and activity, we found it rather depressed. I would say it is still very much a work in progress.

We walked for half an hour toward Rotherham along the canal, the path littered and unattractive, the water a filthy soup, yet being fished by two taciturn chaps, and the surrounding buildings ugly, old and derelict. Having reached a point beyond our tear-off map, we found our way across to the River Don and headed back toward the city along the Five Weirs Walk, the water here a little more appealing or at least enough so for the ducks and other water birds about. The walkway took us past old abandoned warehouses, covered in graffitti, under dark bridges, and then reaching new highrise commercial buildings, alongside rather strange art installations in the middle of the river. Clusters and cairns of stone and steel stand like dwarf piles in the middle of the river, with little signs explaining the sentiment behind some of them, many of this quite thought provoking even if a little pretentious. From here it was all uphill back to the cathedral where we caught the tram back to the Park & Ride, and so back home.