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Main article: History of Sheffield
The area that is now the City of Sheffield has been occupied since at least the last ice age,[12] but the settlements that grew to form Sheffield date from the second half of the 1st millennium, and are of Anglo-Saxon and Danish origin.[13] In Anglo-Saxon times the Sheffield area straddled the border between the kingdoms of Mercia and Northumbria. The Anglo Saxon Chronicle reports that King Eanred of Northumbria submitted to King Egbert of Wessex at the hamlet of Dore (now a suburb of Sheffield) in 829.[14] This event made Egbert the first Saxon to claim to be king of all of England. After the Norman conquest, Sheffield Castle was built to control the local settlements, and a small town developed that is the nucleus of the modern city.
By 1296 a market had been established at what is now known as Castle Square,[15] and Shefffield subsequently grew into a small market town. In the 14th century Sheffield was already noted for the production of knives, as mentioned in Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales[16], and by 1600 it had become the main centre of cutlery production in England, overseen by The Company of Cutlers in Hallamshire. From 1570 to 1584 Mary, Queen of Scots was held as a prisoner in Sheffield Castle and Sheffield Manor.[13]
In the 1740s a form of the crucible steel process was discovered that allowed the manufacture of a better quality of steel than had previously been available, and at about the same time a technique for fusing a thin sheet of silver onto a copper ingot to produce silver plating was invented and became widely known as Sheffield plate. These innovations spurred the growth of Sheffield as an industrial town. However, the loss of some important export markets led to a recession in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The resulting poor conditions culminated in a cholera epidemic that killed 402 people in 1832.[13] The industrial revolution saw a resurgence of Sheffield through the 19th century. As a result of its growing population, the town was incorporated as a Borough in 1842 and granted a city charter in 1893.[17] The influx of people also led to demand for better water supplies, and a number of new reservoirs were constructed on the outskirts of the town. The collapse of the dam wall of one of these reservoirs in 1864 resulted in the Great Sheffield flood, a flood that killed 270 people and devastated large parts of the town. The growing population also led to the construction of a large number of back-to-back slums, which, along with severe pollution from the factories, inspired George Orwell, writing in 1937, to declare, "Sheffield, I suppose, could justly claim to be called the ugliest town in the Old World".[18]
A recession in the 1930s was only halted by the increasing tension as World War II loomed. The steel factories of Sheffield were set to work making weapons and ammunition for the war. As a result, once war was declared, the city became a target for bombing raids, the heaviest of which occurred over the nights of 12 December and 15 December 1940 (now known as the Sheffield Blitz). More than 660 lives were lost and numerous buildings were destroyed.[19]
Following the war, in the 1950s and 1960s, many of the slums were demolished and replaced with housing schemes such as the Park Hill flats. Large parts of the city centre were also cleared to make way for a new system of roads.[13] Increased automation and competition from abroad resulted in the closure of many of the steel mills. The 1980s saw the worst of this run-down of Sheffield's industries (along with those of many other areas in the UK), culminating with the 1984/5 miners' strike. The building of the Meadowhall shopping centre on the site of a former steelworks in 1990 was a mixed blessing, creating much needed jobs but speeding the decline of the city centre. Attempts to regenerate the city were kick-started when the city hosted the 1991 World Student Games, which necessitated the construction of new sporting facilities such as the Sheffield Arena, Don Valley Stadium and the Ponds Forge complex.[13] The city is now changing rapidly as new projects aim to regenerate run-down parts of the city. One such project, the Heart of the City Project, has seen a number of public works in the city centre: the Peace Gardens were renovated in 1998, the Millennium Galleries opened in April 2001, and the Winter Gardens were opened on 22 May 2003. A number of other projects grouped under the title Sheffield One aim to regenerate the whole of the city centre.
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 Sheffield Town Hall and the Peace Gardens
The majority of council-owned facilities are now operated by independent charitable trusts. Sheffield International Venues runs many of the cities sporting and leisure facilities, including Sheffield Arena and Don Valley Stadium. Sheffield Galleries and Museums Trust and the Sheffield Industrial Museums Trust take care of galleries and museums owned by the council. These include the Millennium Galleries, Lyceum Theatre and the Crucible Theatre.
In 2004/5 the Gross Revenue Expenditure of £1,229 million was distributed as follows:[29]
Education 33%
Housing 25%
Social Services 17%
Other Services 11%
Highways, Transportation and Planning 6%
Leisure and Tourism 5%
Refuse Collection and Disposal 2%
Environmental Health 1%
The city currently returns six MPs to the House of Commons, but this will be reduced to five at the next election as one constituency is shared with Barnsley.
International links
Sheffield is formally twinned with:
China
Germany
Donetsk, Ukraine
Esteli, Nicaragua
There are more informal links with:
Japan
Kitwe, Zambia
United States.[30]
Sheffield has also had close links with Poland, since Polish ex-servicemen who had fought alongside British forces during the Second World War settled in the city. As a result a Polish consulate was opened in the City in 1997, the first new Polish consulate to open in the UK for over 60 years.[31]
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Main article: Culture of Sheffield
7.2% of Sheffield's working population are employed in the creative industries, well above the national average of 4%.Open Up Sheffield is an annual event over the first two weekends in May where local visual artists and fine craft workers invite the public to their studios and other venues.
Music
 Former National Centre for Popular Music
Former National Centre for Popular Music
Sheffield has been the home of several well-known bands and musicians, with an unusually large number of synth pop and other electronic outfits hailing from there. These include the Human League, Heaven 17, the Thompson Twins, Wavestar and the more industrially inclined Cabaret Voltaire. This electronic tradition has continued: techno label Warp Records was a central pillar of the Yorkshire Bleeps and Bass scene of the early 1990s, and has gone on to become one of Britain's oldest and best-loved dance music labels. Moloko and Autechre, one of the leading lights of so-called intelligent dance music, are also based in Sheffield. The city is also home to Gatecrasher One, one of the most popular nightclubs in the north of England.
Sheffield has also seen the birth of Pulp, Def Leppard, Joe Cocker, The Longpigs and the free improvisers Derek Bailey and Tony Oxley. 1998 Mercury Music Prize award winners Gomez are also connected to Sheffield, as some of the founding members went to Sheffield Hallam University together. The Arctic Monkeys, who have recently exploded onto the UK music scene with the fastest selling debut album of all time,[32] the math rock band 65daysofstatic, classic rockers Firegarden and 21st century blues merchants Outroads are four of the most recent additions to the list.
The city's ties with music were acknowledged in 1999, when the The Grapes, D 'n' R Live (formerly Under The Boardwalk) and The Cricketers.
Attractions
Sheffield has two major theatres, the London.[33] There are four major art galleries, including the modern Millennium Galleries and the Site Gallery, which specialises in multimedia.
The city also has a number of other attractions such as the Sheffield Winter Gardens and the Peace Gardens. The Botanical Gardens are currently undergoing a £6.7-million-pound restoration. There is also a city farm at Heeley City Farm and a second animal collection in Graves Park that is open to the public. The city also has several museums, including the Sheffield City Museum, the Kelham Island Museum, the Sheffield Fire and Police Museum, Abbeydale Industrial Hamlet and Shepherd Wheel. Victoria Quays is also a popular canal-side leisure and office quarter.
There are about Liverpool, for example, has 26 Grade I listed buildings. This situation led the noted architecture historian Nikolaus Pevsner, writing in 1959, to comment that the city was "architecturally a miserable disappointment" with no pre-19th century buildings of any distinction.[34]
Large parts of the city are designated as sites of special scientific intrest (areas of land which the British Government considers to be of special interest by virtue of its fauna, flora, geological or physiographical features) including several urban areas.
Media and film
 The Arts Tower, part of the University of Sheffield
The Arts Tower, part of the University of Sheffield
The films Showroom Cinema. A song by This Is England" features the lyric: "This is England / This knife of Sheffield steel / This is England / This is how we feel."
Education
Sheffield has two universities, the University of Sheffield and Sheffield Hallam University. The two combined bring 45,000 students to the city every year, including many from the Far East. As a result of its large student population, Sheffield has many bars, cafes, clubs and shops as well as student housing to accommodate them.
Sheffield College is the city's only college. It was created from the merger of six colleges around the city. These have been reduced to just three. Castle College in the city centre, Hillsborough College and Norton College. There are also 141 primary schools and 23 secondary schools, of which seven have sixth forms, most notably, Silverdale School, High Storrs School and King Edward School in the south of Sheffield. There are also seven private schools.
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Hotels in United Kingdom - Sheffield >>
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