Orwell In Sheffield

I have been away in Yorkshire carrying out some research for a book I am working on. While I was in Sheffield, I took the opportunity to visit Neepsend, the area by the River Don where George Orwell stayed while carrying out research for The Road To Wigan Pier.

Following on from my most recent post on Beyond 1984, in which I wrote about Kate and Gilbert Searle, with whom Orwell lodged during his stay in Sheffield, I decided to see if anything remained of the street in which they lived. I write that in a negative tense, because like much of Sheffield’s Don Valley, actual dwellings in Neepsend were virtually obliterated during the ‘slum’ clearances of the 1960s and 1970s. Therefore, I didn’t expect to find many, if any, houses remaining, but I wasn’t prepared for what I found. I’ll provide a detailed description in my next post of what Neepsend is like today, but I would first like to give readers an insight into what it was like in the 1930’s.

Neepsend is located on the lower slopes of Shirecliffe Hill, one of Sheffield’s many steep hills. It nestles beneath Parkwood Springs, an open, lightly wooded area that has always been used for recreation, being too steep for house building. Parkwood is now the home of the Sheffield Ski Village, a dry ski slope, but in Orwell’s time it was just open land used as an amenity by the locals. The view of the city from the hill above Parkwood is magnificent, but would have been very different in 1936. Then, massive steelworks dominated the Don Valley with chimneys belching out smoke and dust. In addition to this, Neepsend was also the site of a huge gasworks that filled the air with the choking, foul smelling miasma produced by burning coal. Orwell describes the view and the appalling smell in The Road to Wigan Pier, quoted as follows, “And the stench! If at rare moments you stop smelling sulphur it is because you have begun smelling gas…I halted in the street and counted the factory chimneys I could see; there were thirty-three of them.”

As a patriotic Sheffielder, I have mixed feelings about Orwell’s description of his time in the City. Even the most avid, die-hard citizen would have to admit that, at that time, large parts of Sheffield suffered from industrial pollution as bad as one could imagine. However, the city was not totally blighted by this industrialisation. Most of the heavy steel industry was concentrated along the course of the River Don as it wended its way circuitously between the city’s many hills. Steelworks could not be constructed on the hillsides, so the slopes were where much of the city’s housing was built. Therefore, many Sheffielder’s lived above the level of the outpouring of the chimneys. Not all were so lucky, however. In the late nineteenth century, thousands of tiny ‘two up-two down’ workers houses were built in areas that were in close proximity to the steelworks, Neepsend being one such area. This is where Orwell chose to stay, in possibly the worst possible location in the whole of the Don Valley.

Image reproduced with kind permission of Sheffield Library Services.
The above aerial view of Neepsend was taken in 1930, just six years before Orwell’s visit. The area where he stayed can be seen on the left of the image. The photograph was almost certainly taken on a weekend or a holiday, as the visibility is clear with little smoke to be seen. The following image (also from 1930) gives an idea of what Neepsend was really like, and was taken from a street quite near to where Orwell stayed and gives an idea of what he would have seen from his bedroom window. If Orwell’s intent was to stay in the most extreme locations, then he most certainly chose wisely in selecting Neepsend!

Image reproduced with kind permission of Sheffield Library Services.