The blade himself
Reflections on a trip to the Steel City
It took me a long time to get to Sheffield. Not in the sense of travel: two hours from St Pancras is not so long. But 29 years is a long time to visit a place when your childhood bedroom still has several of its football jerseys in it.
Largely unworn, I add. I've never cared much for football, and team affiliation in England is often inherited. And if it is not exactly a privilege to be lumbered with a squad of no-hopers, it is better than the alternative.
As such a work trip to Sheffield was something of a pilgrimage to the site of my dad's early adulthood, where he attended university and stuck around for a few years. Sometime later he made it to London, with a spell in Australia along the way.
I'm told that he went back to Sheffield once and was disappointed by the state of it. His time in the city coincided with the onset of its decline, as industry succumbed to foreign competitive pressures and jobs were lost. I can believe it was in bad nick on his return.
I equally suspect he'd be more impressed these days, were he alive to visit. There are the familiar pockets of poverty and post-war architectural monstrosities. Plenty of buildings are boarded up as though they had previously been occupied by Fred West. But the sky is heaving with new developments.
I cannot say whether this is good. The same is true of Nine Elms, a ghastly district in London which made the news after residents were spotted swimming in their ‘sky pool’. Such indulgences would be more excusable if the capital were more affordable to the plebs, and fewer luxury flats sat empty.
The same cannot admittedly be said of Sheffield, where some properties go for a mere five figures. We heard a young woman in a pub complain about the cost of living and had to laugh. The price of a pint here is a good decade behind London's, and most other things match it.
That much may well have been true in the seventies, when my dad was resident. As I climbed up his old road to the west of town I reflected that a half-century is a long time in anybody's life, and that he would be an old man now.
Fifty years has however not spoilt the bucolic view from one end of his old street. Sheffield is surrounded by hills, as Wikipedia and the odd bored local might tell you. The Peak District, which we bussed out to one afternoon, is more spectacular still, and the city is plenty green.
By contrast, I suspect the tattoo parlour wasn't there in my dad's time. The coffee, sourdough and craft beer bottle shops that flank his old high street were probably absent too.
Similar newcomers have been seen in other neighbourhoods round the country, merely accentuated in places like Sheffield that are stuffed with students and trendies. The sense of youth is only marginally undercut by the absence of Black Lives Matter posters in earnest windows, or anything else referencing what Twitter talks about most days.
It's tempting to conclude that the city's racial uniformity is also what makes the England flags flown for this Euro football tournament less awkward, but Brighton is similarly white and St George's Cross is a notch above the Swastika there. Perhaps the North, having had less fortune, is simply less embarrassed about it.
Northerners may be less embarrassed full stop. People seemed more inclined to chat, perhaps to an extent that southerners would find irritating. The only trouble with those who strike up conversation with you is that they more often want to talk at you than with you.
Still, a few days in Sheffield leaves me barely wiser about the North-South divide – almost as if such things require patient study rather than a few smartarse observations. But unlike my dad, I am not an engineer. And for now this is a journalist's country, however much steel Sheffield still makes.