‘The biggest street art festival Sheffield has ever seen’

Good afternoon readers — and welcome to this week’s Monday briefing.

As (meteorological) autumn begins and thousands of us do the school run for the first time in a month and a half, you could be forgiven for feeling a little bit gloomy. So today we thought we’d focus on something bright and colourful to cheer you all up. Starting this Saturday, Lick of Paint will be the biggest street art festival Sheffield has ever seen with 20 talented artists visiting the city from around the world and multiple new murals going up all over the city centre. What’s going on and how can you get involved? That’s today’s big story.

As well as that, we have news of a clutter of false widow spiders that have been found in Sheffield (a clutter is the collective noun for spiders), a great investigation in our sister title The Mill about the person responsible for the recent wave of flags that have been put up in Manchester, and a lovely home in Meersbrook.

In case you missed it

For our weekend read, Dan headed to Hillsborough, arguably one of the city’s most rapidly changing neighbourhoods, where the greasy spoon cafes and traditional boozers of yesteryear are being crowded out by micropubs and small plates restaurants. While writing about gentrification can often fail to do justice to the nuances of a very complex issue — the previous sentence arguably being a good example — readers appreciated Dan’s sensitive approach. Lois Hopkins wrote: “Excellent, well-balanced article[...] I think your comparison to Park Hill is spot on.” Unfortunately due to a technical error, this edition was not automatically emailed to subscribers when it appeared on the website so, if you happened to miss it, you can read it here. 

We’re sorry we were one edition short last week. We’d been working on a deep dive into Event Central, the council-backed new venue on Fargate that has mysteriously seen its price tag soar from £7m to more than £14.4m. At the council meeting on Thursday it was agreed that a key document would be disclosed to the public, but by Friday afternoon it still hadn’t turned up. We’ve got it now, so we’ll be publishing our piece tomorrow. 

Earlier in the week, freelancer Katharine Swindells wrote a fascinating piece about the existence of “childcare deserts” — similar to food deserts, where residents struggle to buy fresh produce — in certain parts of the city. It’s something parents raised as a concern while fighting the closure of Middlewood Nature Nursery and it was interesting to see how starkly the data proves them right. You can read an excerpt of that piece below. 

Across Sheffield, 23% of neighbourhoods have fewer than 15 childcare places per 100 children, and 45% have less than 20. In contrast, areas like Broomhall, Sharrow and Crookes, have more than double the childcare availability. For families without a car, the picture is even tougher. 51% of Sheffield neighbourhoods have fewer than 15 childcare places accessible within 25 minutes of public transport, including up to 15 minutes walking.

Editor’s note: The Tribune had a great weekend with 20 new members joining up: welcome to you all. Most of the new members came from this appeal we sent out on Sunday, in which our editor Daniel admitted that The Tribune is lagging behind where we wanted to be at this time in the year. But don’t worry, there is something that you can do to help! As Daniel wrote: 

“As the internet fills up with lots of unreliable information, people are less likely to trust things they see online — but more likely to trust the words of a friend or family member. If you can tell them why you think our journalism is worth reading (and supporting) it’ll make much more of an impact than anything we post or share on social media.”

If you like our reporting and agree that reader-funded journalism rather than ads is the best model for both The Tribune and Sheffield, you can support us by joining today (if you aren't already a member), or sharing this piece with a friend (if you’ve already joined). Thank you.

The big picture: Swan lake 🦢

Some of the photos of Sheffield on social media take your breath away and this is one of the best. Many thanks to Simon Walkden for this beauty of the boating lake at Millhouses Park.

The big story: ‘The biggest street art festival Sheffield has ever seen’

Top line: This week, Sheffield is hosting the city’s biggest street art festival ever. On Saturday and Sunday (6-7 September), the Lick of Paint festival will see almost 20 street artists painting new murals all over the city centre. Here’s what they have planned.

Paint the town: The festival has been set up by two Sheffield-based artists, Alastair Flindall, who runs Neck of the Wood studio, and street artist Peachzz (real name Megan Russell), best known for creating the huge Reverie mural at Pound Park. Last year, Reverie was named one of the best murals in the world by the website Street Art Cities. The pair hope that, after this year’s festival, Lick of Paint will return every two years.

• As part of the festival a huge new mural will be painted on the side of Kelham Island Museum, as well as smaller pieces at Fitzalan Square, King Street in Castlegate, the Wicker Pharmacy and The House skatepark in Neepsend.
• Local artists Kid Acne, Rob Lee and Elle Koziupa (who did the painting for Joan of Arc on London Road) will be joined by national and international artists, like Tech Moon from Cornwall and George Rose from Australia.

Nothing lasts forever: This isn’t the first time someone has tried to start a street art festival in Sheffield. In 2016, the Feature Walls festival saw a host of large murals painted in the city, many of which have gone on to be local favourites, including The Snog by Pete McKee (real name Frank & Joy) on the side of Fagan's, and Frau Isa’s mural on the side of the Red Deer pub on Pitt Street. However, many of the other murals painted at the same time have now faded, including Florence Blanchard’s abstract work on the side of Shakespeare’s pub on Gibraltar Street.

Street Art Sheffield: Since Feature Walls, Sheffield has become an "up-and-coming" street art destination. At least according to Andy Carter, the enthusiast behind Street Art Sheffield, a comprehensive online catalogue of the city’s “open air art”. Set up in 2014, the site has so far recorded more than 1,000 artworks by more than 200 artists in 450 different locations. Andy does regular tours of the city’s street art — find out more on his site — and will be leading two free tours as a festival-exclusive. He said:

Lick of Paint will be the biggest street art festival Sheffield has ever had. I’ve long felt that the city needed and deserved something like this. We have a good street art scene at the moment but something like this can really help take it to the next level. There is currently a lot of buzz around street art in Sheffield and the fact that money is coming in from sources like Sheffield Marketing shows the city is getting more behind it now. I know that there have been people in the council opposed to murals in the past but that now seems to be shifting.

Graffiti tourism: The reasons behind the council’s change of heart aren’t difficult to figure out: street art is increasingly seen as a way of bringing tourists to cities. Valparaiso in Chile is often lauded as the street art capital of the world, while Barcelona is filled with murals by artists including Picasso and Miro. In the UK, Manchester and Bristol have both become street art destinations and people often travel long distances to see a new Banksy (although being visited by the UK’s most infamous street artist can cause problems of its own).

Our take: For us, backing street art feels like a no brainer. Talented artists get to show what they can do and we all get a brighter, more attractive city as a result. As The Tribune wrote in 2023, other cities such as Glasgow got behind the idea of encouraging high quality street art years ago. With several murals in Pounds Park backed by tourism body Visit Sheffield, and now the new Lick of Paint biennale, there are welcome signs that Sheffield is following suit.

For a full list of everything that is happening over the weekend, click here.

Your Tribune briefing 🗞️

🟡 Saturday’s edition of The Times included a highly sympathetic interview with former Sheffield Hallam MP Nick Clegg about the seven years he spent working for Meta, the company behind Facebook, and his new book, How to Save the Internet, based on the knowledge he acquired there. Clegg's decision to leave Meta in January, as Donald Trump re-entered the White House, almost definitely had something to do with the fact he urged CEO Mark Zuckerberg to ban Trump from Facebook following the January 6 riot. It’s clear the former deputy PM is on the defensive — “I do not have £100 million in my bank,” he insists, before conceding he’s “incredibly lucky to have been paid very, very well indeed” — which is unsurprising given a Telegraph article lambasted him today for “simpering at Zuckerberg's feet”. Are you convinced by his contrition? Let us know in the comments.

🕷️ Regular Tribune contributor David Bocking has some worrying news for local arachnophobes – our own Dan Hayes included — as the UK’s most venomous spider arrives in Sheffield. Even worse, if the weather holds, the city’s False Widows will soon produce a healthy crop of spiderlings, who “will spin a thread of web and launch themselves into the skies above our city”. But don’t panic too much: despite being related to the Black Widow, the Noble False Widow’s bite is only about as bad as a wasp sting, although one local victim tells Bocking their hand swelled up “like a boxing glove”. 

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 Our colleagues at the Manchester Mill published a fantastic investigation on a group of self-styled patriots called “Churchill’s Lions,” who have been erecting British and English flags around their city, a trend that has also spread to South Yorkshire. One of Manchester’s leading flag-raisers “Salford T-Bone” — who has posted videos to TikTok of the flags going up with AI-generated music mocking asylum seekers — turns out to be a man known as Lee Twamley, who was sentenced to 20 months in prison in 2016 for being part of a five-person illegal immigration operation. “Rather than putting up flags across Manchester to protest unacceptably high levels of illegal immigration into Britain,” the Mill writes, “he was sneaking around at the border in Coquelles, France, attempting to bring immigrants into Britain illegally”. When asked about this contradiction, Twamley told the Mill: “Old news.”

This week’s weather 🌥️

Our weather forecast comes from dedicated Sheffield weather service Steel City Skies, who say this week will be unsettled throughout with bright spells and a regular risk of showers or spells of rain.

Monday 🌦 Windy from the southwest with showers increasing in coverage during the day. Highs of 20C.

Tuesday 🌦 A dry start gives way to further showers, more especially during the afternoon. Breezy with highs of 20C.

Wednesday 🌦 Windy and unsettled with a spell of rain during the morning clearing to brighter spells and blustery showers. Highs of 20C.

Thursday 🌦 Further showers expected, some of these again on the heavy side. Staying breezy from the southwest with temperatures around 20C.

Friday 🌦 Less shower coverage, with a better chance of lengthier dry and brighter spells for us. Breezy and rather cool with highs of 19C.

Outlook: Not a lot of change through the weekend, with average temperatures, some brighter spells but also the risk of a few showers. Remaining breezy.

To see the full forecast and keep up to date with any changes to the outlook, follow Steel City Skies on Facebook.

The weekly Whitworth ✍️

Cartoonist James Whitworth with his take on back to school day in Sheffield.

Home of the week 🏡

This three-bedroom terraced house is on Nicholson Road in Meersbrook and boasts both a cellar and a paved back garden. It’s being sold with no onward chain and with an asking price of £240,000. 

Things to do 📆

Art 🎨 On Tuesday, the Millennium Gallery hosts a free talk about the recent Ashmolean Museum exhibition Colour Revolution, which challenged perceptions that the Victorian age was dark and gloomy. Curator Matthew Winterbottom will discuss this fascinating history, highlighting objects ranging from Ruskin’s studies, Turner and Whistler’s experiments with colour harmony, and Morris & Co’s elaborate designs. The hour-long talk begins at 6pm.

Music 🎹 Led by the winner of BBC Radio Scotland Young Jazz Musician of the Year 2023, on Wednesday Ben Shankland brings his trio to The Lescar. Jazz at the Lescar says the trio's music is “driven by melody and lyricism, with a nuanced take on rhythm and texture, and a playfulness that’s always present”. Tickets are priced £7-£10 and doors open at 8pm.

Talk 🏛️ On Thursday, find out how Sheffield’s first public museum and its collections came into being in this talk at Weston Park Museum. In the talk, you’ll discover the people and organisations who were integral to establishing the museum in 1875, and you’ll also see how the original building, which was converted from a private house, Weston Hall, looked very different to the museum we know today. The free hour-long talk begins at 1pm.