Sheffield blog

Grass-lined green tramlines for Sheffield?

Yesterday, Stuart Grimshaw (@Stubbs on Twitter) sent this link to inhabitat.com showing European trams and trains travelling through cities on green beds of grass and suggested how good it would look in Sheffield.

I agree, and think it would be a great way to enforce our greenest city credentials. As it puts it on inhabitat.com:

From Barcelona to the Czech Republic, Frankfurt, St-Etienne and Strasbourg, these public transit greenways are showing the potential of incorporating landscaping into good urban design.

How would it actually look in Sheffield? Here are a couple of slightly rushed mockups based on two Flickr photos (thank you iwouldstay and Xerones) that give you an idea:

Or, given the northern climate, would our beds or grass soon turn into urban mud baths?

Is Twitter going mainstream in Sheffield?

Since the start of 2009, the number of people following this blog on Twitter has increased noticeably. I was planning on commenting on this in a blog post, then of course over the last few days coverage of Twitter seems to have exploded, with mentions from Jonathan Ross, Stephen Fry and even Phillip Schofield on This Morning.

This will no doubt further encourage people to sign up, so I thought it was high time to update the  list of Sheffield-based Twitter users with anyone new. Here are the additions:

Design Sheffield – Twitter account to accompany Design Sheffield blog
http://twitter.com/designsheffield

Plug – the music venue/nightclub
http://twitter.com/plugsheffield

Sheffield United news – goal alerts and aggregated news from Bramall Lane, part of the footytweets.com network
http://twitter.com/sheffieldutd

Another Wednesday news feed – also part of the footytweets.com network
http://twitter.com/sheffieldwed

Trinity FC – updates from matches
http://twitter.com/trinityfc

BarCamp Sheffield – unconference weekend events organised by GeekUp
http://twitter.com/barcampsheff

sheffieldgeeks – group of local tech-minded folk
http://twitter.com/sheffieldgeeks

Sheffparties – event organisers
http://twitter.com/Sheffparties

Pink Grease – Sheffield punk rock band (not updated regularly)
http://twitter.com/rorita

Identifying new users based on geography isn’t as easy as it used to be. The Twitter people search is now name not location-based and Twitterlocal is no longer a website application. However, now that more and more people are on Twitter, it is easier to naturally stumble across local people using it.

So if you are new to microblogging using Twitter and fancy finding some locals then why not visit the Sheffield-based Twitter users page and also scan through the people @sheffieldblog is following?

After 23 years, the world-famous design studio has closed

There have been rumours about the internationally-renowned design studio The Designers Republic closing this week, and sadly it appears that they are true.

Creative Review magazine’s blog has an interview with tDR founder Ian Anderson, who explains how an unfortunate combination of factors caused the company to fold.

Ian hints that the name will live on in some shape or form, although at the moment this will be little consolation for the nine staff who lost their jobs, for which he is understandably gutted.

Let’s hope that tDR eventually rises again in Sheffield.

Full blog post on creativereview.co.uk

Ramsay’s Great British Nightmare comes to Sheffield

You will have no doubt heard by now about Gordon Ramsay’s visit to The Runaway Girl last summer, where he worked his ‘magic’ and turned it into Silversmiths restaurant.

Well in case you missed yesterday’s tweet, the broadcast date has been set for Friday 30 January at 9:00pm on Channel 4.

Radio Times describes The Runaway Girl as being run by ‘two best friends at war with each other’, so it will be in interesting to see the makeover unfold.

Understandably, the owners have said that they will be watching with intrepidation and a stiff drink from behind the sofa…

See Sheffield’s latest building in a new light

If you have been in town after dark recently then you will have probably seen the flashing lights of the new Sheffield digital campus illuminating the night sky – if not then watch footage of this uploaded to qik.com by Twitter user @watfordgap.

A couple more glimpses of the buildings have now appeared online. Last week @tomasinho uploaded a video tour of the exterior, and an Electric works Flickr group is also showing pictures from inside.

The Flickr group in particular includes some good shots of the talking point of the development, the helter-skelter slide in the Electric works building that transports you from the top floor to the foyer area in seconds.

And if you work in digital content development or within the region’s digital media sector and are interested in engaging with Channel 4′s interactive arm 4iP, get yourself an invite to the 4iP Yorkshire launch, which is taking place at the Sheffield digital campus next month.

The illuminated Building 2.0 in Sheffield digital campus (taken from the station walkway)

Town battles on as it awaits the arrival of Sevenstone

It is a difficult time for the city centre at the moment. While the promise of the new retail quarter has raised hopes that town will once again become a significant northern shopping destination, walking past the empty shops on the Moor and Pinstone Street is presently quite depressing.

Although it was reported last week that footfall in town has increased by 17,000 people a month, for me the city centre still needs all the help it can get to encourage shoppers.

Seemingly, the council has recognised this and is making some effort to give town its best chance of success before the arrival of Sevenstone, with hoardings displaying images of Sheffield being erected around derelict buildings marked for demolition.

And according to this council email, a new website promoting shopping in the city is in the pipeline:

A new website will be launched in April that shows just what’s on offer for shopping in the city centre. It will show potential shoppers what shops are here, where they are, and what they sell. Retailers will be able to update special offers and events, and talk to other retailers through the site. The aim of the site is to promote Sheffield as a competitive retail destination. It’s a joint initiative between the council, Creative Sheffield and the Chamber of Commerce.

So if these initiatives work, what will people think when they arrive in the town? Some visitors from London commented to me that as an urban environment, parts of the city centre look great (I did take them on a selective route of the city). But some areas look very run-down and we know that for shopping, it still has a long way to go.

With current economic conditions causing more retailers to fold and further shop units to stand empty, I can’t help but feel that it will get worse before it gets better. However, I am also sure that in due course we will once again have a shopping destination of which to be proud.

FirstGroup is introduced to good customer service – by a third party developer

So with fares in the region going up 8% yesterday, the thought of catching the bus in the morning for your first day back at work is probably not filling you with joy – particularly if you end up waiting in the cold not knowing when the next one will arrive.

One option would be to use the YourNextBus SMS service but  like me, you have probably never bothered due to the cost of it on top of the normal text message charge.

You can also find out when your next bus is for free using the Travel South Yorkshire website, but if you have tried viewing this site on a mobile phone then you will realise how hard it is to use.

However, I will now be trying a neat new application called The Next Bus that gives the same information but using a clean interface that should offer a much improved experience for those using mobile phone devices.

You first need to find the bus stop number on the bus stop or by using the search engine/clunky map on travelsouthyorkshire.com. Once you have it, simply enter the stop number on The Next Bus and it returns the latest bus timetable information.

I tried it for the stop on Crookes Road just down from the Old Grindstone (stop number 37020400) and it worked a treat.

So if you have an internet-enabled smartphone, bookmark http://thenextbus.appspot.com/ now. And send your thanks to the person who developed it.

It looks like this application also works for services in West Yorkshire, Belfast, Cardiff, Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire, Surrey and Kent.