The question of aesthetics is rarely objective but retaining the city’s history is a rational ‘objective’. For the environment and our climate the default position should be to repurpose buildings to avoid the production of unnecessary concrete and other materials.
Many thanks for this article, and could not agree more. Sadly, I find myself in a minority when extolling the virtues of Park Hill, and for me, the Cole Brothers building is an excellent foil to the City Hall opposite - we have a fine city square which needs to be kept intact. Yes, the stuff about asbestos is nonsense, so it does smack of a consultation on a decision already made, just to soften us up to accept it - a place where we seem to have been all too often in the past.
I mourn the loss of the excellent Art Deco factory on Penistone Road, and also the excellent Sheffield and Ecclesall Coop store at the end of Ecclesall Road - now the irredeemably ugly box that is Waitrose.
But I also worry about an uncritical desire to save everything, though I can understand why when Sheffield has so little in the way of fine buildings, and so much of what has been built in recent decades is cheap and nasty. I do not miss the Castle Market building or Broomhall flats, amongst others, but do like the Castle House Coop and the old Town Hall - both old and newer bits - so I hope the latter can be saved and made good use of.
On appreciating modernist buildings, I did find it crazy that English Heritage wanted, at great expense, to preserve the concrete facings on Park Hill - to me the whole point of it was the grid that the concrete formed, the visual impact of which would have been ruined had the proposed 10x10m hole in it gone ahead. It seemed to be lost on English Heritage that ornate Georgian stonework is not the same as purely functional concrete, and I likewise worry that so many people cannot see the beauty in functional but well-formed modernist buildings like the Cole Brothers store.
In my subjective opinion I like the John Lewis/Cole Bros building, Castle Market should have been Listed and as a resident of Park Hill I am a big fan of Modernist and Brutalist architecture. As a child I didn’t like sprouts, though my mother told me they were lovely and good for me, but I do like them now and eat other veg as well.
I really enjoyed this article. It was very interesting to hear from Robin, what heritage is in terms of our buildings. I agree Cole’s should be repurposed because when it’s gone, it’s gone. Who are we, the current residents of Sheffield to determine good and bad buildings? I’d prefer future generations to see what there was architecturally in Sheffield. As you point out in the article, it’s only 60 years old and a stand out structure. Sprouts is different matter altogether!
Thought provoking article. I don't understand the new vision for the city centre and agree serious thought needs to be given to retaining Cole Bros building as the building works in the city centre appear to be never ending
I have a lot of time for Robin both as regards his views ,hard work and research. Sadly over a hundred years and more the bulk of the really historical and interesting stuff from Halls and Cottages to Farms and Pubs Etc have gone as David Fine in his excellent Sheffield Guide has pointed out.I could quote lots of examples- Joseph Hunter made a point about this tendency to not regard anything that didn't have any commercial potential for the industrious Sheffielders of Sheffield way back in the early eighteenth century.There aren't many votes in respect of Heritage or is that me being cynical? Interesting piece and I think I know which side you are on. If it wasn't for the HHBS -see their sadly not yet updated history -it could have been a darn site worse.
I have mixed feelings about this article. I agree that preserving historic buildings isn’t PURELY about aesthetics but it is, and should be, MAINLY about aesthetics. And I’m coming from a position that aesthetics is objective and NOT in the eye of the beholder! Broom hall flats were ugly, objectively so; Castle Market was ugly, objectively so. The fact that people say they enjoyed shopping there doesn’t change that fact and nobody outside of a minority of the population who CLAIM to find brutalism attractive ever visited those places for aesthetically pleasing reasons.
To use food as an analogy; if you don’t like eating sprouts, you don’t carry on eating them after you’ve tried them, you eat more tasteful vegetables. Likewise, if you create a building that doesn’t hold the affection of the majority of its population, then you don’t preserve such a building and you certainly don’t build more of that type. Sheffield got the crass architecture it did because there wasn’t the finance or the political will to put back what Hitler destroyed and then the 1950s/60s ideologues who thought they were so enlightened that they knew what the future was going to be (how wrongly naive and stupid they were as Robin Hughes points out) ignorantly built on the destruction that Hitler had started.
So, should the John Lewis building remain? Clearly it’s not as ugly as Broomhall flats, nor is it as beautiful as the City Hall. If it can be improved and a viable use can be found then I have a feeling that it may be better to keep it as I shudder at the thought of what could possibly replace it! Personally I quite liked the proposal to take a chunk out of the sides of the building so that, from above, it looked like a large S right in the centre of the city. How appropriate. These two ‘missing’ chunks on Cambridge Street and Burgess Street could be glassed over to become cafés, restaurants etc as the rest of the building is reconfigured and reused.
A thoughtful article about an important issue but surely deficient in two ways: first for not mentioning the possibility of demolishing the John Lewis building and creating a public space; and second for not mentioning the adjacent 'red' building that is currently being demolished, or so it appears.
The question of aesthetics is rarely objective but retaining the city’s history is a rational ‘objective’. For the environment and our climate the default position should be to repurpose buildings to avoid the production of unnecessary concrete and other materials.
Many thanks for this article, and could not agree more. Sadly, I find myself in a minority when extolling the virtues of Park Hill, and for me, the Cole Brothers building is an excellent foil to the City Hall opposite - we have a fine city square which needs to be kept intact. Yes, the stuff about asbestos is nonsense, so it does smack of a consultation on a decision already made, just to soften us up to accept it - a place where we seem to have been all too often in the past.
I mourn the loss of the excellent Art Deco factory on Penistone Road, and also the excellent Sheffield and Ecclesall Coop store at the end of Ecclesall Road - now the irredeemably ugly box that is Waitrose.
But I also worry about an uncritical desire to save everything, though I can understand why when Sheffield has so little in the way of fine buildings, and so much of what has been built in recent decades is cheap and nasty. I do not miss the Castle Market building or Broomhall flats, amongst others, but do like the Castle House Coop and the old Town Hall - both old and newer bits - so I hope the latter can be saved and made good use of.
On appreciating modernist buildings, I did find it crazy that English Heritage wanted, at great expense, to preserve the concrete facings on Park Hill - to me the whole point of it was the grid that the concrete formed, the visual impact of which would have been ruined had the proposed 10x10m hole in it gone ahead. It seemed to be lost on English Heritage that ornate Georgian stonework is not the same as purely functional concrete, and I likewise worry that so many people cannot see the beauty in functional but well-formed modernist buildings like the Cole Brothers store.
In my subjective opinion I like the John Lewis/Cole Bros building, Castle Market should have been Listed and as a resident of Park Hill I am a big fan of Modernist and Brutalist architecture. As a child I didn’t like sprouts, though my mother told me they were lovely and good for me, but I do like them now and eat other veg as well.
I really enjoyed this article. It was very interesting to hear from Robin, what heritage is in terms of our buildings. I agree Cole’s should be repurposed because when it’s gone, it’s gone. Who are we, the current residents of Sheffield to determine good and bad buildings? I’d prefer future generations to see what there was architecturally in Sheffield. As you point out in the article, it’s only 60 years old and a stand out structure. Sprouts is different matter altogether!
Thought provoking article. I don't understand the new vision for the city centre and agree serious thought needs to be given to retaining Cole Bros building as the building works in the city centre appear to be never ending
I have a lot of time for Robin both as regards his views ,hard work and research. Sadly over a hundred years and more the bulk of the really historical and interesting stuff from Halls and Cottages to Farms and Pubs Etc have gone as David Fine in his excellent Sheffield Guide has pointed out.I could quote lots of examples- Joseph Hunter made a point about this tendency to not regard anything that didn't have any commercial potential for the industrious Sheffielders of Sheffield way back in the early eighteenth century.There aren't many votes in respect of Heritage or is that me being cynical? Interesting piece and I think I know which side you are on. If it wasn't for the HHBS -see their sadly not yet updated history -it could have been a darn site worse.
I have mixed feelings about this article. I agree that preserving historic buildings isn’t PURELY about aesthetics but it is, and should be, MAINLY about aesthetics. And I’m coming from a position that aesthetics is objective and NOT in the eye of the beholder! Broom hall flats were ugly, objectively so; Castle Market was ugly, objectively so. The fact that people say they enjoyed shopping there doesn’t change that fact and nobody outside of a minority of the population who CLAIM to find brutalism attractive ever visited those places for aesthetically pleasing reasons.
To use food as an analogy; if you don’t like eating sprouts, you don’t carry on eating them after you’ve tried them, you eat more tasteful vegetables. Likewise, if you create a building that doesn’t hold the affection of the majority of its population, then you don’t preserve such a building and you certainly don’t build more of that type. Sheffield got the crass architecture it did because there wasn’t the finance or the political will to put back what Hitler destroyed and then the 1950s/60s ideologues who thought they were so enlightened that they knew what the future was going to be (how wrongly naive and stupid they were as Robin Hughes points out) ignorantly built on the destruction that Hitler had started.
So, should the John Lewis building remain? Clearly it’s not as ugly as Broomhall flats, nor is it as beautiful as the City Hall. If it can be improved and a viable use can be found then I have a feeling that it may be better to keep it as I shudder at the thought of what could possibly replace it! Personally I quite liked the proposal to take a chunk out of the sides of the building so that, from above, it looked like a large S right in the centre of the city. How appropriate. These two ‘missing’ chunks on Cambridge Street and Burgess Street could be glassed over to become cafés, restaurants etc as the rest of the building is reconfigured and reused.
A thoughtful article about an important issue but surely deficient in two ways: first for not mentioning the possibility of demolishing the John Lewis building and creating a public space; and second for not mentioning the adjacent 'red' building that is currently being demolished, or so it appears.
Regards
JR
Bamford