In Sheffield, we visited the River Sheaf, which runs underground beneath the city center in a series of 19th-century stone culverts. Sheffield was founded at the confluence of the Sheaf and the larger River Don, and it was a world center of metallurgy, steel production, cutlery, and armaments well into the 20th century.
The city’s metalworking industry developed the two most important processes behind the modern steel industry: the “crucible steel” process in 1740, and the Bessemer Converter in 1856. Stainless steel was invented here in 1912. The city manufactured decorative metalwork and household wares as well, especially after a Sheffield cutler invented an early method of silver-plating (“Sheffield Plate”) in 1742.
When visiting the town in 1762, the writer Daniel Defoe wrote:
This town of Sheffield is very populous and large, the streets narrow, and the houses dark and black, occasioned by the continued smoke of the forges, which are always at work: Here they make all sorts of cutlery-ware, but especially that of edged-tools, knives, razors, axes, & and nails….
These knives had been the core of the city’s production since the Middle Ages, and had made Sheffield famous throughout England and the world. In the 14th-century Canterbury Tales, one of the characters in the Reeve’s Tale carries a “Sheffeld thwitel,” or knife. Sir Walter Scott lived four centuries later, but he set his novel Ivanhoe in the 12th century and the first character in the book carries “…one of those long, broad, sharp-pointed, and two-edged knives, with a buck’s-hoon handle, which were fabricated in the neighborhood, and bore even at this early period the name of a Sheffield whittle.” Sheffield knives came the U.S. as well. (As did the word “whittle,” now used as a verb.) The humble Barlow knife, oft considered an American classic, was invented in Sheffield by Obadiah Barlow in 1670. Bowie knives were invented by the American Colonel Jim Bowie—but within a few years of his invention, Sheffield was producing most of the Bowie knives sold in America.
The River Sheaf and its smaller neighboring streams provided the power behind this long tradition of metalsmithing. Neither the Sheaf nor the Don were big enough to navigate with a cargo-carrying boat of any large size (although smaller boats on the Don provided vital transportation of raw materials for the knifemakers), but the Sheaf was fast-flowing, with steep grades that could drive waterwheels. Smaller tributaries of the Sheaf flowed equally swiftly, and small water-powered mills were built in the area as early as the 12th century. In the centuries leading to the Industrial Revolution (and for many years after), waterwheels moved bellows, powered forge hammers, and drove the machines that rolled and cut metal for these knives and tools.
Most importantly for Sheffield’s development, water was able to power grinding mills, which was a necessity for any serious cutlery manufacturing. (Cutlery includes edged weapons and tools like hoes, shovels, and axes as well as knives and tableware.) Without waterpower from the Sheaf or Porter Brook, Sheffield could not have developed the early industries and technologies that allowed the city to become a leader in the industrial production of metal products into the modern age.
To get into the tunnel of the Sheaf, we followed the old course of the Porter Brook, which had once been a long and winding stream that flowed from across the city to merge with the Sheaf. The little stream had been altered almost beyond recognition, however, by mills seeking to use its water for power in the 18th century. Millraces had re-channeled the water into a series of millponds that only vaguely followed the Brook’s original path. Now the remnants of the stream—an ankle-high trickle—flows through concrete troughs and into its own tunnel, and then merges with the Sheaf underground. John, Chris and I followed the water until we came to the concrete mouth of the Porter’s culvert. Turning on headlamps and tugging up our waders, we plunged into the darkness.
Showing posts with label SHEFFIELD. Show all posts
Showing posts with label SHEFFIELD. Show all posts
SHEFFIELD: THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
When we came to the confluence of Porter Brook and the Sheaf, we were also directly underneath the Midland train station. This had been one of the first sections of the river to be covered over, when the station was built in 1870. The station was widely hailed as an engineering masterpiece for utilizing the site over the river, as this meant supporting the culvert against the weight of heavy trains. Looking around, we found ourselves in wide, low tunnel, divided into three channels, with each channel about twelve feet wide and a little taller than my head. Between the channels a series of heavy rough-stone arches looked like they would hold for the next thousand years. But the water level seemed low. The stream mostly flowed in just one or two of the channels, and we were able to walk dry in the third.
By the time Midland Station was built, the city had already turned its back on the Sheaf, though the river was not yet buried. A century before, in 1770, there had been 133 “wheels” (the general name for a factory/mill building with multiple workrooms), which used waterpower to run 896 “troughs,” or individual grinding-wheel workstations. The first steam-powered grinding wheel in Sheffield was installed in 1786, however, and by 1840 the power sources were evenly split. By 1865 there were 132 steam-powered factories and few, if any, that used waterpower.
A copy of a map from the 1890s showed us the factories and mills that had existed close to where we now stood, still at the confluence of the Porter and the Sheaf. There had been over a dozen cutlery, gilding, and silver plate factories within a five-block radius, places like the Pond Hill Works, the Clarence Works, and the Queens Plate and Cutlery Works. There were massive steel and iron mills: the Scandanavian Steel Works, the Soho Rolling Mills, the Central Hammer Works, and others. Larger than anything else, and closest to where now stood, there had been the giant Albion Saw Mills and the Sheaf Saw Mills. Their timber yards abutted the railroad tracks of Midland Station, and like the station the yards had been built over the underground Sheaf. Though next to the Sheaf, these factories and sawmills had all been powered by steam.
Almost all of these business had sprung up in that heady time between about 1819, when the Sheffield Canal was opened to provide a navigable waterway along the River Don, and 1890, when the city had become the undeniable center of the world’s steel and cutlery industries. The population growth during this period had been extremely rapid, from about 65,000 in 1819 when the Canal opened, to 161,475 in the 1851 census just thirty years later. By 1900, the city was close to a half-million, nearly the same as the population today.
Just as in the other industrializing cities of Britain, the downside of this fantastic growth was absolutely terrible conditions for the workers. Grinders suffered from silicosis and tuberculosis, and at mid-century nearly sixty percent of fork, needle, razor, and file grinders would die before age thirty. Children worked ten or twelve hour days in many factories, and an 1862 “Children’s Employment Commission on the Metal Manufactures of the Sheffield District” records witnesses such as William Henry Widdicombe, age 8, grinder; Thomas Darwin, age 6, grinder; Maria Lansley, age 9, hand-fly operator; Henry Kay, age 10, riveter; Joseph Broadhead, age 10, saw-glazer; and Sarah Ann Tingle, age 9, fork-filer.
Concomitant with the factory work were terrible, overcrowded living conditions for the workers. This translated into terrible pollution of the Sheaf, as it became both a trash dump and the primary sewer for the dense worker housing along its shores. A doctor speaking at an 1886 commission on contagious diseases complained that the river was “...filthy and disgusting,” and went on to describe what he’d found in the old millponds (or lakes) and in the river itself:
The bed of the River Sheaf, the bottom of the lakes, and the ground occupied by the mill reservoir, are extensively covered with black, decomposing mud, much of which still consists of putrefying organic matter; and, taking note of the dead dogs and cats which may be seen there….the whole appearance of the river and its tributaries, as they pass between and below the houses of Sheffield, is abominable. Offensive gases are constantly escaping in bubbles from the filthy deposit…
Other doctors at the conference agreed that “[t]he state of the Porter and the Sheaf is a disgrace to the civilization of the nineteenth century.” However, with no real possibility of cleaning up the river, their only serious proposal was to make a covered sewer around the last two miles of the Sheaf, between the neighborhood of Heeley and the confluence of the Don. The full length of this proposed culvert was never built, but the doctors would doubtless be gratified to know that by the early twentieth century, a little more than a mile of the river had been almost completely covered over.
By the time Midland Station was built, the city had already turned its back on the Sheaf, though the river was not yet buried. A century before, in 1770, there had been 133 “wheels” (the general name for a factory/mill building with multiple workrooms), which used waterpower to run 896 “troughs,” or individual grinding-wheel workstations. The first steam-powered grinding wheel in Sheffield was installed in 1786, however, and by 1840 the power sources were evenly split. By 1865 there were 132 steam-powered factories and few, if any, that used waterpower.
A copy of a map from the 1890s showed us the factories and mills that had existed close to where we now stood, still at the confluence of the Porter and the Sheaf. There had been over a dozen cutlery, gilding, and silver plate factories within a five-block radius, places like the Pond Hill Works, the Clarence Works, and the Queens Plate and Cutlery Works. There were massive steel and iron mills: the Scandanavian Steel Works, the Soho Rolling Mills, the Central Hammer Works, and others. Larger than anything else, and closest to where now stood, there had been the giant Albion Saw Mills and the Sheaf Saw Mills. Their timber yards abutted the railroad tracks of Midland Station, and like the station the yards had been built over the underground Sheaf. Though next to the Sheaf, these factories and sawmills had all been powered by steam.
Almost all of these business had sprung up in that heady time between about 1819, when the Sheffield Canal was opened to provide a navigable waterway along the River Don, and 1890, when the city had become the undeniable center of the world’s steel and cutlery industries. The population growth during this period had been extremely rapid, from about 65,000 in 1819 when the Canal opened, to 161,475 in the 1851 census just thirty years later. By 1900, the city was close to a half-million, nearly the same as the population today.
Just as in the other industrializing cities of Britain, the downside of this fantastic growth was absolutely terrible conditions for the workers. Grinders suffered from silicosis and tuberculosis, and at mid-century nearly sixty percent of fork, needle, razor, and file grinders would die before age thirty. Children worked ten or twelve hour days in many factories, and an 1862 “Children’s Employment Commission on the Metal Manufactures of the Sheffield District” records witnesses such as William Henry Widdicombe, age 8, grinder; Thomas Darwin, age 6, grinder; Maria Lansley, age 9, hand-fly operator; Henry Kay, age 10, riveter; Joseph Broadhead, age 10, saw-glazer; and Sarah Ann Tingle, age 9, fork-filer.
Concomitant with the factory work were terrible, overcrowded living conditions for the workers. This translated into terrible pollution of the Sheaf, as it became both a trash dump and the primary sewer for the dense worker housing along its shores. A doctor speaking at an 1886 commission on contagious diseases complained that the river was “...filthy and disgusting,” and went on to describe what he’d found in the old millponds (or lakes) and in the river itself:
The bed of the River Sheaf, the bottom of the lakes, and the ground occupied by the mill reservoir, are extensively covered with black, decomposing mud, much of which still consists of putrefying organic matter; and, taking note of the dead dogs and cats which may be seen there….the whole appearance of the river and its tributaries, as they pass between and below the houses of Sheffield, is abominable. Offensive gases are constantly escaping in bubbles from the filthy deposit…
Other doctors at the conference agreed that “[t]he state of the Porter and the Sheaf is a disgrace to the civilization of the nineteenth century.” However, with no real possibility of cleaning up the river, their only serious proposal was to make a covered sewer around the last two miles of the Sheaf, between the neighborhood of Heeley and the confluence of the Don. The full length of this proposed culvert was never built, but the doctors would doubtless be gratified to know that by the early twentieth century, a little more than a mile of the river had been almost completely covered over.
SHEFFIELD: SHEFFIELD BEFORE THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
We walked along in a darkness alleviated only by our headlamps. The water was still shallow, never occupying more than two of the three channels. The arched stonework was beautifully laid, though still of rough stones, and it felt to me like we were in the foundations of a cathedral. The thick stonework completely insulated us from the sounds of the city, and in this silence the trickling and gurgling of the water sounded loud.
“It is no great tax on the imagination to divest the Sheffield of to-day of its furnaces, its rumbling rolling-mills, and its brick and mortar, and to clothe its sharp crests and undulating hollows with their primaeval timber and pristine verdure,” a writer opined in The English Illustrated Magazine in 1884. As I walked along, I tried to imagine that I was walking alongside the full, unpolluted river that Sweyn, the Saxon lord of Sheffield Manor, had looked upon in the 11th Century AD.
“….the Sheaf in those days was an unspoiled, very charming stream with plenty of fish in it, and the banks edged with flowers,” I had read in a book called The Making of Sheffield. The fish had always been so plentiful, in fact, that even into the 19th century some apprentice indenture contracts specified that the master could not make the apprentice eat salmon more often than twice a week. The water that flowed next to me seemed clean enough, with no more refuse than is expected in an urban stream, but I was completely unable to imagine fish in it.
I couldn’t imagine what the river would look like with “primaeval timber and pristine verdure,” either, and so after the trip I looked at old maps of Sheffield to try to see how the river and town had changed. A map from 1780 showed me the Sheaf in a nearly-natural state: far from being covered over, the river was crossed by only a single bridge. The Porter Brook fed two small ponds for watermills—the “Forge Pond,” the water from which went to power grindstones and tilt hammers, and the “Mill Pond,” which powered a mill for grinding grain.
A map from 1832, fifty years later, showed surprisingly few differences. As on the 1780 map, the industrial district seemed to contain only a few mills clustered around the two central millponds. Most of the forges and grinding mills at the time would still have been located in small hamlets outside of town, with a large workshop/mill building employing a dozen people, and with various machinery all powered by a single waterwheel. In a grinding mill, for example, one waterwheel would power six to ten “troughs,” or individual grinding-stations; at each station, the grinder would side or lie in a wooden framework that suspended him over the six-foot-diameter stone grinding wheel.
By 1855, maps began to show an inchoate version of the modern city layout Porter Brook was no longer visible, the water channeled instead through a series of millponds and underground millraces. Three bridges cross the Sheaf in the downtown area, and though the factories and millponds had proliferated since 1832, they remained consolidated in a small area, only about a half-mile square. Just to the south, an expanse of land labeled “The Farm” began around Granville Square, where today’s culvert around the Sheaf ends. In the contemporary city, this landmark is memorialized with a two-block-long street called Farm Road.
“It is no great tax on the imagination to divest the Sheffield of to-day of its furnaces, its rumbling rolling-mills, and its brick and mortar, and to clothe its sharp crests and undulating hollows with their primaeval timber and pristine verdure,” a writer opined in The English Illustrated Magazine in 1884. As I walked along, I tried to imagine that I was walking alongside the full, unpolluted river that Sweyn, the Saxon lord of Sheffield Manor, had looked upon in the 11th Century AD.
“….the Sheaf in those days was an unspoiled, very charming stream with plenty of fish in it, and the banks edged with flowers,” I had read in a book called The Making of Sheffield. The fish had always been so plentiful, in fact, that even into the 19th century some apprentice indenture contracts specified that the master could not make the apprentice eat salmon more often than twice a week. The water that flowed next to me seemed clean enough, with no more refuse than is expected in an urban stream, but I was completely unable to imagine fish in it.
I couldn’t imagine what the river would look like with “primaeval timber and pristine verdure,” either, and so after the trip I looked at old maps of Sheffield to try to see how the river and town had changed. A map from 1780 showed me the Sheaf in a nearly-natural state: far from being covered over, the river was crossed by only a single bridge. The Porter Brook fed two small ponds for watermills—the “Forge Pond,” the water from which went to power grindstones and tilt hammers, and the “Mill Pond,” which powered a mill for grinding grain.
A map from 1832, fifty years later, showed surprisingly few differences. As on the 1780 map, the industrial district seemed to contain only a few mills clustered around the two central millponds. Most of the forges and grinding mills at the time would still have been located in small hamlets outside of town, with a large workshop/mill building employing a dozen people, and with various machinery all powered by a single waterwheel. In a grinding mill, for example, one waterwheel would power six to ten “troughs,” or individual grinding-stations; at each station, the grinder would side or lie in a wooden framework that suspended him over the six-foot-diameter stone grinding wheel.
By 1855, maps began to show an inchoate version of the modern city layout Porter Brook was no longer visible, the water channeled instead through a series of millponds and underground millraces. Three bridges cross the Sheaf in the downtown area, and though the factories and millponds had proliferated since 1832, they remained consolidated in a small area, only about a half-mile square. Just to the south, an expanse of land labeled “The Farm” began around Granville Square, where today’s culvert around the Sheaf ends. In the contemporary city, this landmark is memorialized with a two-block-long street called Farm Road.
SHEFFIELD: TO THE RIVER DON
The tunnel changed shape and size several times, marking different eras of construction of the culvert. All were stone or brickwork. Above, Sheaf Street followed our exact route; most of the street had been laid directly over the culvert. Close to the Don, we were now in an older area of the city, where some of the first millponds had been. Appropriately, the neighborhood that was above us is named Pond Hill, and nearby is Pond Street.
The tunnels under Pond Hill were the largest we’d yet seen, and they were made of finished stone instead of the rough blocks we’d seen earlier. I estimated that the arched channels are about twenty feet high. The Brobdingnagian proportions seemed ludicrous when compared with the twelve-inch-deep stream that flowed past our boots. Incredibly, the tunnel expanded again as we came into sight of the outlet to the River Don: a truly vast chamber, with an arched ceiling that made me think of being in a cathedral or a stadium. I later found out that the masonry arch that loomed over us had originally been the Canal Bridge, which had connected the city center (just to the west of the Sheaf) to the Sheffield Canal basin (just to the east of the Sheaf).
The water has not always been so low. On the night of March 11th, 1864, heavy rains caused Sheffield’s new water-supply dam to break a few miles east of town. Nearly three million tons of water roared down the Loxley River valley, into the Don, and through the center of town. Between 240 and 290 people were killed. The London Times reported that sleeping residents were drowned “like rats in a hole.” The water was high enough near the mouth of the Sheaf (where it connects with the Don) that children were drowned in their second-story bedrooms, and the next day corpses were found stuck in a tree and lodged at the top of a haystack.
Maybe this had been on the mind of the builders of the tunnel when they made it so grand. In fact, the Sheaf has continued to flood occasionally, and in sections where its channel is not quite as large, it has burst its banks and flooded nearby areas. Just a few months prior to our visit, on June 25, 2007, heavy rains had caused both the Sheaf and the Don to swell over their banks; a 13-year old boy was wept away and drowned by the Sheaf.
The River Don was the end of our journey, and we climbed along the waterline and up the riverbank, streaming water. I was happy that we’d come out here; just about where we climbed up the riverbank, I knew, there had once been the clearing that gave Sheffield its name—a field along the Sheaf (or Shef) River, where a Saxon village developed. After the Norman conquest of 1066 AD, a castle had been built on the same spot, and just as the Sheaf is below the contemporary city, fragments of the old castle still exist beneath today’s Castle Market.
In fact Sheffield history can be traced back much further even than that. The very oldest evidence of human-built dwellings in England—remnants of a hut from 10,000 years ago—was discovered in a region in northern Sheffield. The residents of these earliest built structures doubtless drank and fished in these same rivers and streams, and perhaps it would be possible find out enough to determine just how their community interacted with rivers and other still-extant parts of their environment. But I was satisfied already. The River Sheaf has flowed through all of Sheffield’s history, and with it as a connecting thread we had already explored nearly a thousand years of the city’s past. That’s plenty for one day. We packed up our gear and set off to walk back to the car—aboveground, and fully in the present.
The tunnels under Pond Hill were the largest we’d yet seen, and they were made of finished stone instead of the rough blocks we’d seen earlier. I estimated that the arched channels are about twenty feet high. The Brobdingnagian proportions seemed ludicrous when compared with the twelve-inch-deep stream that flowed past our boots. Incredibly, the tunnel expanded again as we came into sight of the outlet to the River Don: a truly vast chamber, with an arched ceiling that made me think of being in a cathedral or a stadium. I later found out that the masonry arch that loomed over us had originally been the Canal Bridge, which had connected the city center (just to the west of the Sheaf) to the Sheffield Canal basin (just to the east of the Sheaf).
The water has not always been so low. On the night of March 11th, 1864, heavy rains caused Sheffield’s new water-supply dam to break a few miles east of town. Nearly three million tons of water roared down the Loxley River valley, into the Don, and through the center of town. Between 240 and 290 people were killed. The London Times reported that sleeping residents were drowned “like rats in a hole.” The water was high enough near the mouth of the Sheaf (where it connects with the Don) that children were drowned in their second-story bedrooms, and the next day corpses were found stuck in a tree and lodged at the top of a haystack.
Maybe this had been on the mind of the builders of the tunnel when they made it so grand. In fact, the Sheaf has continued to flood occasionally, and in sections where its channel is not quite as large, it has burst its banks and flooded nearby areas. Just a few months prior to our visit, on June 25, 2007, heavy rains had caused both the Sheaf and the Don to swell over their banks; a 13-year old boy was wept away and drowned by the Sheaf.
The River Don was the end of our journey, and we climbed along the waterline and up the riverbank, streaming water. I was happy that we’d come out here; just about where we climbed up the riverbank, I knew, there had once been the clearing that gave Sheffield its name—a field along the Sheaf (or Shef) River, where a Saxon village developed. After the Norman conquest of 1066 AD, a castle had been built on the same spot, and just as the Sheaf is below the contemporary city, fragments of the old castle still exist beneath today’s Castle Market.
In fact Sheffield history can be traced back much further even than that. The very oldest evidence of human-built dwellings in England—remnants of a hut from 10,000 years ago—was discovered in a region in northern Sheffield. The residents of these earliest built structures doubtless drank and fished in these same rivers and streams, and perhaps it would be possible find out enough to determine just how their community interacted with rivers and other still-extant parts of their environment. But I was satisfied already. The River Sheaf has flowed through all of Sheffield’s history, and with it as a connecting thread we had already explored nearly a thousand years of the city’s past. That’s plenty for one day. We packed up our gear and set off to walk back to the car—aboveground, and fully in the present.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)