What is it about Sheffield?
Someone, can't remember who - someone trying to sound poncy, I presume - once unfavourably compared walking through Sheffield with a Truffaut film.
Apart from being a nonsense comparison, like comparing a horse with an astronaut, it suggests Sheffield has no romance, and I wish to disagree.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not going to try and cosmeticise it and pretend it's Paris. Neither am I going to lapse into identikit tourist brochure-speak and say everything's "vibrant" and "world-class". Designer clothes shops and fancy restaurants there may be, but when I go to Sheffield I don't want celebrity chef-style cuisine, I can have that anywhere. I want a coronation chicken roll and some Parkin from Scott's Pantry, a fishcake butty and some Henderson's Relish.
Orwell was bang-on when he said that, "Sheffield, I suppose, could justly claim to be called the ugliest town in the Old World: its inhabitants, who want it to be pre-eminent in everything, very likely do make that claim for it." Quite right they do.
Because to pretend otherwise would be to misunderstand the city. Its origins in ice, iron and fire, coal and steel, exactly what is it that makes it special – which it is - is hard to define. Hence it remains somewhat under-written. But there's summat about it, there's no doubt about that. Its appeal is instinctive, elemental - musky, like pheromones.
Founded in foundries, on the clash of hot metal on metal, the chink of steel knives on china, its reputation as a grotty northern town endures, which is reassuring: it has retained its character despite extensive urban redevelopment threatening to airbrush its painful past.
Twice torn apart for its steel and coal, its surface aesthetic may not be conventionally attractive - Venice it is not. But neither is it all volcanoes and slag heaps, dark clouds and air tasting of sulphur, rows of chimneys belching out effluence, Blake's Dark Satanic Mills - although there's beauty to be had in those images (give me "grim" over "thriving" and "vibrant" any day of the week).
A city in a deep valley forming a natural fortress - a womb perhaps, or a vagina - through which five rivers trickle, Sheffield has its own romance. Not only has it been the setting of my own fair share of romantic encounters - we honeymooned there for a start - there's beauty in its strength of character, honesty and lack of pretension. It's there in its remaining surface rust. It's there when street lights twinkle through twilit mist across its hills, like diamonds and pearls released across a trollop's cleavage - oh, I can romanticise until the cows come home, don't you know.
While run-down doesn't necessarily mean characterful, and new doesn't necessarily mean superficial, Sheffield's soul is found in its refusal to conform and be rendered faceless. Its geographical diversity almost defies town planning - 61% of it is greenspace; large parts of it are sites of special scientific interest. City of flat caps and flat vowels, the landscape is far from so, and its natural assets require no enhancement - hills dominate the skyline from every angle, which figures: Sheffield is many-breasted, those hills give you a giant hug. And it's the hills that define its contradictions and contribute to its mystique. Despite constant comparison with its closest rivals - Manchester and Leeds - it stands on its own, literally: "Because of its origins as an agglomerate of hamlets and villages in a bowl of seven hills, it's always been thought of as fiercely individual and slightly “other” even by its near neighbours" (Stuart Maconie). One of England's largest cities outside London, it feels smaller than it is. Renowned for its villagey feel, it's inclusive without being parochial.
I lived there once, as a student from 1992-1995, which in the context of a lifetime is a one-night stand. Aptly, my first glimpse of it was at night, a blur of bright lights and shadows, geared up for an influx of students bent on heady decadence. What I didn't see was a city on the brink of reinvention, evolution. A city about to be redefined, sloughing its skin to emerge as a regeneration strategist's wet dream. Walking down West Street at night became increasingly surreal - like walking through a scene in Blade Runner - as roads were torn up for the Supertram link to Meadowhall. Elsewhere saw the demolition of condemned buildings and concrete tower blocks, while trendy loft apartments and a panoply of experimental architecture and public art appeared, the Hole in the Road was filled in, and fountains sprang up in the city centre (that wet dream fulfilled).
Talk about pathetic fallacy. I was a tiny detail, nothing more than a full stop in a library of books, but like an indulgent, non-judgmental parent Sheffield folded me in and gave me permission to create myself, live life on my own terms for the first time. This I did through my rawest emotions, pounding the streets in a succession of DM and steel toe-capped boots, metal on stone, like iron in a forge. Now, like my old hall, the me who once lived there is no longer around, I'm a different person. We went through our transformations together.
Sorby Hall (left) and Earnshaw Hall: demolished in 2006 to make way for student flats.
That's why Sheffield means life to me more than any other city, more than any other place I've lived. Since leaving I've been about a bit and spent longer in other places, yet Sheffield is the only place I've ever loved straight away. I didn't have to work at it, or wait for time to make my mind up for me.
Perhaps it's a side-effect of the student experience, and let's face it (we all had to in the end) being a student isn't real life. And there will always be those - fleeting visitors, usually - who can't understand what all the fuss is about.
But non-students claim a similar attachment. Perhaps you have to live there, really spend some time there to get the iron in your blood - not that this accounts for its instantaneous effect on me.
Whenever I go back to visit, its aaahhh factor is palpable. It feels like home, and many's the time I've debated going back to live there permanently.
If life were that simple. Perhaps if I really wanted to, I'd have found a way by now. Living there again might ruin the fairy tale -and that scares me.
Instead, my "crush" on Sheffield continues. Living in the south (the things one does for love and work) I aspire to northernhood. I'm an honorary northerner, or what Stuart Maconie calls a "northerner in exile". Born and bred in Lincolnshire, I can affect a passable northern accent and it's how I spin myself in the workplace.
And when a shimmering miasma rises from the sea, reducing all things to shape and shadow, there's a hydrangea-filled park near here which reminds me of the Botanical Gardens at dusk, a truly enchanting place.
There's also a hill. We call it the Sheffield walk home, because when we walk up it it's like walking anywhere in Sheffield: up a bloody steep hill. And needless to say, Dartmoor, while spectacular in itself, doubles as the heather-strewn Peak District: those storm-sculptured trees, vast swathes and rolling waves of land, like a sea of earth flecked with dirty gold, some of it soft enough to sink in.
And I've not even mentioned the universities, sport, music, the people and that accent - which is sexy (Sean Bean, anyone?) - fluid, like spring water on shiny pebbles (who needs Truffaut when you've got that?) They all speak for themselves.
Sheffield is my soft place to fall.
© Agnetha 2009