Verging on madness

On 12 December 2025, at around 4.30pm, a silver Vauxhall Agila pulled up outside 306 Dobbin Hill in Ecclesall. Doorbell camera footage shows a man, wearing a beanie hat and his collar pulled up high so his face can’t be seen, getting out of the car and shoving an envelope through Guy Rusling’s letterbox. 

When Rusling and his partner opened the envelope, hundreds of cut up pieces of paper spilled out. The handwritten letter inside said the pieces of paper represented the “1,900 plus” people who had signed a petition calling for the grass verge outside Rusling’s home to remain in public hands. “What will neighbours, friends and family think of you,” the letter read, adding: “if you have children — what a terrible example to them?” It ended with a grave warning: “You will never be happy stealing public land!”

The incident happened three days before a public inquiry about Rusling’s application to buy the verge off the council. He is telling me about this while standing on the piece of land in question, a 28.3 metre long strip of grass at the junction of Dobbin Hill and Ringinglow Road. A builder by trade, the 32-year-old has nipped home from work dressed in a baseball cap, a crisp white t-shirt, shorts and a pair of dusty work boots. He’s not previously spoken to any media about the situation. Why now? “Throughout this process, I’ve not once fought my corner,” he says. “I want to put forward my side of the story.”

We wouldn’t normally publish a long read about a verge. Then again, verges don’t tend to spark poison pen letters, social media beef, a 2,200 signature petition, and a full scale replica verge being created in quilt form and laid outside Sheffield town hall as a protest. This one has. We’ve been contacted dozens of times about the verge over the past few years by people on both sides of the increasingly bitter row. These 87 square metres of grass on Dobbin Hill has become the city's most hotly contested territory, Sheffield’s very own Alsace-Lorraine.