As the Steel City renews itself, an industrial past is helping shape the future

In the past two decades, Sheffield city centre has been undergoing an overhaul. The latest piece in the puzzle includes a new sustainable office building, Europe’s largest food hall – and, importantly, the bringing back to life of some of the city’s most important heritage assets. Tasked with this was a team made up of Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios (FCBS), Lathams and Leonard Design. 

It’s no secret central Sheffield suffered greatly when the Meadowhall shopping mall, four miles out by the Tinsley Viaduct carrying the M1 over the River Don, opened in 1990. Since then, the problem of how to return life to the city has generated many proposals, all stalling or failing to come to fruition. 

Today’s scheme is a result of the scrapping of a £600 million development named Sevenstone, which would have involved the demolition and rebuilding of a huge swathe of the city centre by architects including O’Donnell + Tuomey, Hawkins\Brown, Stiff + Trevillion, Acme, Allford Hall Monaghan Morris and BDP. The long-drawn-out process and the eventual cancelling of the project in 2013 was blamed by many for ongoing damage to investment in the city centre.

Retaining historic facades and reviving listed buildings

Known as Heart of the City 2, the masterplan that replaced that failed scheme went in for planning in 2015. Drawn up by Leonard Design, it moved away from large retail units – which had been the focus of the Sevenstone scheme – to smaller maker spaces and locations for local businesses. Rather than demolishing the city’s existing buildings, the new proposals drew on the street plan that was already there to create a scheme with more of a neighbourhood-scale of development. 

The heritage buildings – or at least their facades – would be left intact. By splitting the development up into smaller blocks following the existing street pattern, each could be approached separately or handed over to different partners or developers, further reducing the risk to Sheffield City Council – which had stumped up the money for the project – and ensuring the scheme would be delivered. 

FCBS joined the long-running saga in March 2019. Around the same time, a decision was made that to make the scheme viable, less would be built and more of the area’s heritage architecture retained. This included listed buildings that had shaped this part of Sheffield – such as a Grade II-listed Sunday school and the Grade II*-listed Leah’s Yard – and an 1830s chapel building that, while not listed, was also important to the area.

Named after Henry Leah, a Victorian maker of die stamps for silverware, Leah’s Yard had previously housed 18 ‘little mesters’ workshops – small workspaces for highly skilled craftsmen who made cutlery and tools – set around a courtyard. It had been included in Historic England’s Heritage at Risk register of threatened buildings, and was in danger of being lost. 

At Leah’s Yard, Leonard Design and Lathams began work to stabilise the building before FCBS developed a strategy to bring the units back into use. The resulting design has seen those on the ground floor occupied by local businesses – such as a book shop, a chocolate shop, an art gallery, a plant shop and a beer store – while larger spaces on the upper floor now house podcasting studios, charity offices and a barbershop. ‘It represents the modern idea of making – instead of cutlery, people are now making podcasts or music,’ says FCBS senior associate Simon Richardson. 

From the street Leah’s Yard is signalled by its restored sign, which hangs above the entrance to the courtyard. It has all been smartened and cleaned up – the windows painted letterbox red. I’ve probably walked past hundreds of times, barely noticing the sign that hung above the street, but this now has a presence, and there is a feeling of pride as people pass by. 

This little yard of previously neglected workshops is part of what Sheffield was built on. At one time, little mesters would have been found all over the city. A vital piece of heritage has been restored, and something that had almost been forgotten is known – and used – once more.

Recycling Sheffield's urban fabric

Next to Leah’s Yard are the Sunday school and chapel buildings. The 1830s chapel had been extended in the 1930s, and much of FCBS’s work here has been around rationalising this and uncovering parts of the original fabric. 

The new food hall, Cambridge Street Collective, knits both the Sunday school building and the chapel into its fabric, uniting disparate parts as if making them shake hands. It was here that architects have had to deal with mediating across different uses, balancing a lot of sensitivities and unresolved edges, stitching together heritage architecture with new build. 

Old paint can be seen on the corner of one of the retained facades, while an existing steel structure has been uncovered and painted black. These sit side by side with new concrete stairs, fresh steel, and glass facades that marry up in the joins between the myriad buildings. 

The food hall, which also contains a cookery school, is a vast space spread over multiple floors and half-levels that negotiate the one-storey drop across the site. Two roof terraces are also tucked in between the new Corten roof spaces. 

From here, you can get a real sense of how this scheme knits into the rest of the city centre. You can see the streets heading out from what is known as Henry’s Corner, after a café bar that stood there for decades, to the first phase of the Heart of the City project. 

There we find the Peace Gardens, Pringle Sharratt Richard’s Millennium Galleries and Winter Gardens, Hodder + Partners’ office building, St Paul’s Tower and the steel-clad car park dubbed the ‘Cheesegrater’ (by Allies and Morrison). It feels a part of a much wider transformation of central Sheffield. 

There has been a welcome move away from embracing demolition – which the city, throughout the postwar era, has often been so keen on – and towards the idea of creating places based on heritage and existing character. If the masterplans that came before had gone through, we would have lost history-steeped workshops and other spaces that have so much to tell us about Sheffield’s past.

The soul is coming back to the Steel City, and this scheme could be a major catalyst. The last piece in the puzzle will be to reinvigorate the former Cole Brothers (John Lewis) building that sits across the road from Leah’s Yard. But this sensitive redevelopment sets a tone, and offers a great example of adaptive reuse that many of the UK’s other post-industrial cities could learn from. 

Laura Mark is an architecture critic, lecturer and curator based in Sheffield

In numbers

Total area including terraces and public realm 22,475m2
Whole-scheme GIA 18,545m2
Heart of the City regeneration total cost £470m