Is Sheffield no longer the city that digital media forgot?

30 03 2008

Although there is still catching up to do, the city’s digital industries look set to blossom

In 2002, digital industry magazine New Media Age declared that Sheffield was the UK city that new media forgot. Was this a fair assessment back then - and more importantly, is it still the case now?

Sheffield has always been a creative place. Be it in pop music, graphic design, film, art, dance or theatre, the city has always attracted talented, creative and successful individuals who are at the cutting edge of what they do. But we have been slow to channel this creativity into viable and sustainable economic industries to replace our declining industrial heritage.

In the 80s and 90s we were quick off the mark with the Cultural Industries Quarter and Workstation, and both have been success stories. But as the creative digital industries have taken off in other large northern cities, it seems that Sheffield has been slower to fully embrace this fast-growing sector and as a result only a handful of digital agencies exist, with none in the 2007 New Media Age Top 100.

One positive trend is the niche that the city has carved itself in the e-learning sector, with a cluster of established businesses such as theWorkshop, Line, DESQ and more set to move in.

But the big factor that should help the continued growth of existing digital companies in Sheffield, as well as attracting new ones, is the proposed Sheffield Digital Campus in the city centre. The three-phase project has been talked about for several years but is now finally taking shape, with the flagship Electric Works building - featuring a spectacular slide to transport workers from the top floor to the foyer area - at the centre of the scheme.

As well as offering a creative heart in which the region’s digital companies can collaborate, foster a creative culture and thrive, what is exciting about this development is that it also projects a positive image to those looking outside, showing that the city is genuinely an exciting place to work, with the inherent creative energy here being channelled into a prosperous economic vision.


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Categories : cultural industries quarter, development, digital industries, media, planning, regeneration, sheffield

Cocoa chocolate shop, Ecclesall Road, Sheffield

28 03 2008

Calling all chocolate lovers - the cocoa lounge is here

In terms of chocolate, Easter is a more gluttonous time than Christmas. At yule, people exchange presents - including some chocolate - but the main gifts that people exchange at Easter are confectionery-based ones. And although I don’t like the commercialism and true meaning of the festival being watered down, I love it, because I love chocolate.

Because of this, a visit to Cocoa chocolate boutique on Ecclesall Road was long overdue. I don’t really remember noticing the shop much, but recently it has attracted attention in the local press, partly due to the story behind the present owners taking over. Apparently, the previous owner was selling up and two students that worked there decided to buy the business.

While the front of the premises continues to sell all the chocolate products you could wish for, the rear has been transformed into the Cocoa lounge, and it is this room, combined with the delightful staff, that make the shop something special.

A scrapbook tells the story of how the lounge was created. The room was stripped, a handyman came to fix it up, the walls were painted (blue then after second thoughts, turquoise), some quaint old furniture was moved in and then the girls set about filling the old dresser and walls with every item of chocolate-related memorabilia they could find. It all works together amazingly well.

One of the owners, Kate, gave us a warm welcome; her bubbly personality and enthusiasm making up for the bad news that the hot chocolate machine was unfortunately broken – and apparently hot chocolate machine engineers don’t work holiday weekends. So instead we ordered specialty teas (and by specialty I don’t just mean peppermint, but black forest gateau flavour), hot Guatemalan coffee and fair trade chocolate cookies.

And as a small consolation, Kate threw in a saucer of the chocolate drops that are used to make the hot chocolate. Yum!

If you’ve got a sweet tooth and enjoy quaint and quirky then pay Cocoa a visit, you won’t be disappointed.

Next time I’ll be having the hot chocolate…


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Categories : drink, ecclesall road, food, sheffield

The Moon, Sheffield, first annual beer festival

24 03 2008

What better way to spend the holiday weekend than visiting a local beer festival?

The beer of choice for a group of my friends and I is currently Abbeydale Moonshine (4.3%). It is a very easy-drinking straw-coloured ale and seems to be found in an increasing number of pubs around the city. As with many real ales, attention to detail has also been paid to the artwork on the pump clip and Moonshine is no exception, with a pleasing blue gothic design.

Now I am by no means a beer aficionado, have never been a member of CAMRA and due to the fact I would generally normally buy a non-premium lager or smooth-flow bitter, I have a pretty undeveloped real ale palette. However when flicking through a local beer-lover’s newsletter in the Washington we spotted that a beer festival was taking place at Abbeydale brewery’s Moon pub in Sheffield over Easter and decided it was worth a visit.

Formerly the Office, the Moon pub on Upperthorpe Road was taken over by Abbeydale Brewery in May 2007 and it looks like it is doing quite well, despite it not really being a destination pub in a central location.

It offers a good selection of local real ale all year round, but over festival weekend there were over 50 beers on offer, including 12 from breweries within 20 miles of the pub and then 39 from further afield. Armed with a £1.50 festival glass (printed with the cool gothic logo), the beers I sampled were:

Absolution (Abbeydale), 5.3%
Bee-Ale Z’Bub (Abbeydale), 6%
Double Sunset (Leek), 5%
Shacklers Gold (Hopshackle), 5.2%
Chatsworth Gold (Peak), 4.6%
Bravo (Pictish), 4.7%
Last Rites (Abbeydale), 12%

I think my favourite beers were the fruity Absolution and also Double Sunset. We saved the 12% Last Rites for a treat at the end of the night. The initial general consensus was that it seemed quite nice with a sweet taste but the more mouthfuls we had, the less easily it went down. By the end of the half, the syrupy consistency and sickly sweet alcoholic taste became overpowering and we were glad to finish it. Definitely worth trying though, and for such a strong beer, relatively drinkable.

So overall a good night out - plus a bit of money was raised for charity. And full marks to friendly staff at the pub: at the end of the night we left without our festival glasses but we popped in on Sunday afternoon to pick them up and they were more than happy to sort us out.

Sister Abbeydale brewery pub The Rising Sun at Fulwood is hosting a beer festival in the sunshine from 10-13 July 2008 - I for one will definitely be there, with my gothic festival glass in hand.

moonfestival.jpg

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Categories : beer, drink, festivals, pubs, sheffield

City of Sheffield city centre walkabout (walkabout)

19 03 2008

Exploring the city centre, 1970s style

A few months ago I was given a fantastic item that had been found on eBay - a copy of the early-1970s City of Sheffield city centre walkabout walkabout book (I think the double walkabout in the title is actually a stylistic design feature on the cover).

This publication (rrp 25p) was produced by what I assume was the council marketing department in those days, the quaintly-named Sheffield City Promotions Committee. On the inside front cover, they write:

The aim of this publication is to act as a guide to visitors for a walking tour of the Central Area of Sheffield. The tour, which takes just over an hour at a leisurely walking pace, is intended to show both civic and other important buildings and landmarks, not only of yesteryear, but also some of the more modern counterparts of recent times. At the same time, it is hoped to show some of the Sheffield’s character in its local environment, brought about by the effects of ambitious building schemes and town planning since 1945 together with the clean air legislation in 1972 which led to Sheffield’s claim as being ‘the cleanest industrial city in Europe‘.

Reading the brochure I can’t help but think of the ‘City on the move’ film that opened The Full Monty, as the tone really lends itself to being read in a received pronunciation public service-style voice.

I’m sure copies of this publication from ‘yesteryear’ are quite scarce now, so I’ve pulled together my favourite quotes here:

City of Sheffield city centre walkaboutTown hall extension “This effect, together with leaded roofing are (sic) intended to blend two contrasting styles of building”

Crucible theatre “several television spectaculars have taken place here”

Shopping “Sheffield now has more departmental stores than any other city north of London”

Fargate “A quiet resting place for the weary visitor”

Chapel Walk “has more than a hint of a cosmopolitan atmosphere”

Dove and Rainbow pub “where you are more than likely to hear the chatter of journalists, reporters and other media people during weekday lunchbreaks”

Parkway “It is now possible to drive to either London or Newcastle in under three hours via the motorway network direct from that point”

Ramp near Castle Square “Castle Square’s function as a traffic roundabout can best be viewed from this point” - this view is obviously one not to miss!


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Categories : council, environment, history, promotions, pubs, sheffield, walking

Music in the sun - bring it back

15 03 2008

With so much made of the city’s rich pop music heritage, isn’t Sheffield big enough to support an annual outdoor music festival?

In general, interest in music festivals is at an all time high with one almost every weekend during the summer months. And while festivals used to be seen as the preserve of alternative types, they are now a firm part of the summer social calendar for everyone and heavy media coverage means that millions more can follow the events remotely.

For a few years in the 1990s, Sheffield did have a multi-cultural music festival called Music in the sun. I have fond memories of this - it offered a mix of indie, dance and reggae and tended to include a lot of local acts. Several of these were quite big though and I remember seeing the Longpigs, Baby Bird and Speedy one sunny afternoon in about 1997.

2008 would be a great year to bring the festival back. At the moment Sheffield has a healthy local music scene, with several bands like Little Man Tate, the Long Blondes and Milburn that command a decent live following and would be perfect to play a summer event.

There are also plenty of talented singer-songwriters from Sheffield (Neil McSweeney, Stoney and Helen Boulding) who would be good for an acoustic tent, not to mention the dance acts, DJs, reggae bands and other less mainstream musicians that would give the festival a proper multi-cultural feel.

Plus, perhaps there could be a place for a couple of classic Sheffield bands to also play, for example ABC or Thompson Twins? Although you wouldn’t want to turn the whole thing into a Hear and now-style nostalgia-fest.

Care would also need to be taken that the headlining act wasn’t *too* current and popular as it would diminish the value of the festival and turn it into just a big gig. Certainly Arctic Monkeys, Jarvis Cocker and maybe Reverend and the Makers would fall into this category.

Over the last couple of years there have been murmurings of a return for Music in the sun, but nothing has been announced. I really hope that it comes back and gives Sheffield a music festival that it deserves.


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Categories : arts, bands, festivals, live, music, sheffield

Tinsley cooling towers gift shop

10 03 2008

As the towers are due to come down, one very special shop is to be set up

So does anyone actually know when these are due to come down apart from sometime in the spring/summer? The campaign to save them and turn them into a work of art seems to have been out of the national headlines for a while now following the publicity on Channel 4, the online petition and the campaign’s MySpace site.

However, this isn’t stopping the Cooling the Towers team from keeping the campaign in the public eye with the launch of the a selection of memorabilia to be sold on a not-for-profit basis in a shop in the Millennium Galleries. Get your tea-towels, mugs, badges, plates and postcards now.

Aside from the memory of the towers living on through the merchandise, energy company Eon have offered £500k and an area of land for a replacement work of art on the site.

Although I was a supporter of the campaign to save the towers and will be sorry to see them go, I am fascinated to see what ends up being put there and am open to the idea that this new work of art could even be better than what the towers might have become.

Crucial to the success will be the bodies, organisations, individuals and council/government representatives that end up making the decision on what the work of art is to be.

The thing is, do we know the process for how this will be decided? What we don’t want is another poorly-planned white elephant for Sheffield.

In the meantime, take your photos of the towers and show your appreciation for the cooling towers on YouTube while you can:


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Categories : architecture, cooling towers, sheffield, white elephants

Where are all the Sheffield blogs?

9 03 2008

The city is changing fast, but can local people in the blogosphere keep up?

I have recently been increasing the number of RSS feeds that I subscribe to and decided to look for the best Sheffield blogs on the internet. Where are they all?

Half an hour on Google and I’ve come up with a couple of aggregated feeds from WordPress and Google, news blogs from established institutions like Sheffield University, one or two organisations such as Creative Sheffield and some less local ones covering the whole of Yorkshire.

Plus, there are a wide selection of feeds from Sheffield Newspapers that put the single news feed on bbc.co.uk/southyorkshire to shame (the local BBC site includes a page of Radio Sheffield presenter blogs but with no feeds…what is the point?)

These are all well and good for controlled press releases and news, but where is the heart and soul of the city represented online? Sure, there will be plenty of Sheffielders writing subject-specific blogs about their own lives, but given the size of the city, the levels of civic pride that exist amongst locals and the snowballing redevelopment and regeneration, I would expect there to be more out there on the general topic of Sheffield and how the city is changing.

Perhaps I haven’t looked hard enough or perhaps they aren’t indexed very well in search engines. Either way please leave a comment with a link to any good Sheffield blogs and in the meantime I will continue to write this one.


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Categories : blogs, sheffield