Mazierska/Sounds Northern, 3. 'They Say a Town is Just a Town, Full Stop, but What do They Know?': Architecture, Urbanism and Pop in Sheffield

Sheffield competes only with London, Glasgow and Birmingham for the intensity of its transformation in the immediate post-war decades. Under an effective Labour one-party state, the city embarked on a massive programme of rebuilding, which had extremely melodramatic architectural results. Rather than being designed by volume builders or engineers, Sheffield's housing schemes were produced by the city architect's department, and placed quite deliberately on the city's hillside peaks, as if to announce the city and its priorities from a distance - an effect described in Jonathan Coe's novel What a Carve Up as a socialist citadel, independent and hostile to the capital - the 'socialist Republic of South Yorkshire', as it was only half-jokingly described. This paper attempts to answer the question of whether there is a reason for the fact that Sheffield had this hugely ambitious programme, and the fact that it developed between the late 70s and the early 90s the most consistently interesting, original and develop