Sheffield blog

Hometown glory for DJ Jarvis and his disco

I’ve been beaten to writing about it by this review, but Jarvis Cocker opened his new UK tour at the Carling academy last night to an appreciative hometown crowd.

As well as playing a mix of new material and songs from his debut album, he also ‘lectured’ the crowd using a selection of slides, many of which depicted Sheffield sights.

We saw a photo of a gleaming Roxy/Fiesta development, now of course the Carling academy and Odeon cinema, and also a picture of a slide built in to a hill in a playground. He described this as the slide at Endcliffe park, but if I’m not mistaken, surely he was referring to the slide at Forge dam?

After two encores he popped up in the DJ booth and treated fans to an hour-long disco, playing a eclectic range of stuff, including MC Hammer’s U can’t touch this.

Another review is here from today’s Independent.

Jarvis Cocker DJing at the Carling Academy, Sheffield

Standing your ground

You’ll have no doubt read about the current disagreement over the panels used on the outside of the City lofts St Paul’s tower development in town. In a nutshell, the council agreed a certain specification of cladding, which the developer then changed.

The council has stood firm and now crisis talks are taking place between both parties with the hope of resolving the issue. You can read the detail of the saga unfolding in the 196-page thread in the Sheffield Development Forum.

I was passing the development this week with my camera so took some photos which are below.

Despite it being a brilliant sunny day, the brown panels still looked a bit dingy. And as someone also pointed out in the discussion thread, if this is them at their best, how many clear sunny days will we get in Sheffield to see them like this?

Even with the sun directly reflecting off the side of the building, as shown in the bottom photo, it still has a dated look to me and reminds me a bit of a 70s London building that I used to work in and is about to be ripped down.

What do people think, should the council continue to stand its ground and demand an improved design, risking that the tower is left to stand empty or even be demolished?

A bridge too far – for now

Last year a scheme was approved by councillors to build a replica of the world-famous Brooklyn bridge across the River Don in Sheffield. It was in recognition the city’s links with the Brooklyn bridge in New York, as apparently Sheffield steel manufacturer Andrews Toledo supplied the high-quality crucible steel used for its main hangers.

With most of the funding for the replica in place, all was progressing well until the catastrophic floods of June last year bought the project to a standstill.

I got in touch with Sheffield industrial museums trust to find out the latest. Following the floods, the Environment Agency had to re-assess the river and has recently removed 8,000 tons of rubble and soil from around the weir and Kelham Island itself.

At the moment a new flood wall protection around Kelham is being designed and is scheduled to be built next year. This will affect the bridge design and so the two will have to be integrated, with the wall being built first.

We are reassured that there is is still strong support for the bridge, and in the meantime the funds set aside for the scheme have been invested in a high interest account with the council.

I really hope this project is realised before long. As the background story illustrates, the building of the New York Brooklyn bridge is a poignant and romantic tale, and you can’t help but think that the completion of the replica bridge – after the problems of its own – would be a fitting tribute to its inspirational and beautiful big sister over the pond.

'Sunset on the Brooklyn Bridge'

Image by wenzday01 and used under Creative Commons license

A big hole

I walked past this big man-made crater yesterday. It is next to the university’s Goodwin sports centre:

Goodwin crater

Anyone know what they are building?

Calling all grass-roots geeks, creative visionaries, innovative entrepreneurs and talented technologists

I’m not sure anyone would choose to give themselves any of those titles, but if you are (take a deep breath) a developer, designer, creative, educationalist, technologist, blogger, student, entrepreneur, writer, artist, academic, geek, marketeer, investor or gamer then you should get yourself down to BarCamp Sheffield 2.1: the Joy of Techs later this month.

As explained on the BarCamp Sheffield website, a BarCamp event is an ‘unconference’ that typically takes place over a weekend. The focus is technology in its widest possible sense, and usually features demonstrations, workshops and seminars which attendees are encouraged to run themselves with the intention of maximising knowledge-sharing and learning.

It has grown out of the monthly GeekUp Sheffield events (which also come highly recommended) and takes place at the Showroom cinema cafe bar from 28-30 November. If you can’t commit to the whole weekend then you can drop in just for one of the sessions.

And whether you can attend or not, if you are on Twitter then make sure you follow @barcampsheff to keep up to date with goings-on.

A list of concerts at the stadium from 1993 to 2006 – with videos

A previous post that mentioned getting more live music at Don Valley stadium caused me to search* the internet for some videos of shows at the venue.

Some of the clips I found are from the height of summer which seems a long way off following the dark and foggy weather Sheffield has had over the last couple of days.

So think back to summers gone by and the artists that have played at Don Valley stadium – although I seem to recall that it threw it down when the Stones played back in 2006.

* by the way, I didn’t search that hard for Celine Dion clips

Def Leppard
6 June 1993

Rocket

Let’s get rocked

Bon Jovi
28 June 1995

Rolling Stones
9 July 1995

Michael Jackson
9 July 1997
(I did find a video of Scream/They don’t care about us from this show but it has since been removed from YouTube)

Paul Weller
26 July 1997

Spice Girls
11/12 September 1998

Celine Dion
6 July 1999

Tina Turner
13 July 2000

Red Hot Chili Peppers
6 July 2006

By the way

Under the bridge

Tina Turner
18 July 2006

Rolling Stones
27 August 2006

Honky tonk women

If you were to drill a hole in a straight line through the earth from Sheffield, where would you come out?

If you have ever pondered the above scenario, which I’m sure all of us have, then you are in luck. This Google maps mashup allows you to choose a start point and then it shows you where you would resurface on the other side of the world if you dug (and dug).

I tried it for Sheffield and the result was somewhere in the Southern ocean, south of New Zealand and north of Antarctica:

There you go, I have saved you the bother of digging for yourself…