In which Sid and Doris visit post-industrial Sheffield and Derbyshire, see friends and very wet scenicity.
Sid and Doris are a bit fed up, fretting at home as their house sale stales in Britain’s spooked housing market. Time to visit friends and see the world.
Jenny is in excellent form (thank you for your notes Romney Hythe and Dymchurch railway) and the new hipness of Sheffield is exemplified in the variety of ethnic eats available for lunch in the converted Cutlery works.
Sheffield is culturally Northern, though it is only half way up England. The town has been famous for cutlery since Chaucer’s Reeve carried sword and dagger from these parts in the 14th century Canterbury Tales.
The town grew as water from the Don and Sheff powered workshops. This lucky town had coal, iron and gritstone for grinding wheels. In the 18th century Huntsman developed crucible steel which was quickly augmented by Bessemer steel and suddenly the works were much bigger, turning out not just cutlery but rails, rolled plate for ships, barrels for guns and later crankshafts for Merlin engines. In 1912 low carbon stainless steel was invented in Sheffield at Brown Firth where they went on to develop 18-8, still the most common stainless steel alloy with 18% chromium and 8% nickel. A jolly Sid factoid.
In 1700 the town and environs held 7,000 people. By 1800 and 1900 there were 60,000 and 450,000 respectively. It is bigger now but with empty factories feels diminished.
Sid and Doris head for Kelham Island and Sheffield’s industrial museum, thinking all the while of Bethlehem Steel because these steel works too shut leaving a city without a cause.
All around there are still many reminders of past glories: large numbers of men doing repetitive jobs in the loud and grimy workshops excellently preserved on Little Mesters’ Street in Kelham Island museum, which itself is in the old generating station for the city’s electric trams.
By the time you are pouring this much steel you are well past what the the reeve keeps in his tights.
Sid has a book ‘The amateur’s Lathe’ and occasionally thinks to get some lessons. Doris is here to give scale to this monster. This model is not available from Tool Store.
Here Sid is the scale model, marveling at this 12,000 horse power triple. Each cylinder of the River Don steam engine has a bore of 1 meter and stroke of 1,200 mm. For context, a two litre four cylinder engine might be 86mm square. Built in 1904 it was still working at British Steel’s River Don plant in the 1970s rolling out nuclear reactor shield plates. And it could do these big pieces because it could reverse the roll in two seconds, so the metal didn’t cool too much.
By this time Sheffield was dying, partly sufffering from first mover’s disadvantage. In Germany industrial cities had been smashed. They were rebuilt with Marshall funds while Britain was repaying wartime loans. An enormous proportion of UK wartime output relied on the US machine tool industry. We didn’t have one because no one ever bought new tools. Or ran technical schools, whereas in 1930s Germany 3199 technical schools had 1,800,000 pupils on compulsory courses to age 18. In the UK, industrialists had failed for years to invest in plant or training. German mines of the 1930s like the Zollverein were more modern than many British post war pits which tax payers paid to keep open rather than close and move on. High energy costs, low capital spending, poor education and unions that resisted productivity improvements (on the basis anything good for the bosses was bad for the workers) nailed British industry by the 1970s.
But there are still services. Sid and Doris went to visit the Foundry indoor climbing wall because Sid has started climbing again with Sally and Evie. Sid climbed from age 16 to late 20s, leading the Exeter climbing club and occasionally managing some snow and ice. Sid is now indoor climbing and falling off quite well, which in turn has caused Sally to look at her laurel. And Sid has found a couple of walls near Salisbury. A suivre.
We drive south to Biggin Hall in Derbyshire, a great walkers’ hotel with log fired public rooms, friendly service, fine breakfasts, large packed lunches and a new menu every night. Recommended if you fancy a walk.
Our first walk leaves from Monyash. So, what do we see here? Well, there’s Doris modelling new boots and attitude in the widdling wet. It has been raining in Britain for forty days. Not quite as splendid are these vehicles of the day. The Lotus is an Emira, the first Sid’s seen. At 6’ 10” it might be bit wide for the lanes but you do get either an AMG 4 pot turbo with DSG or Toyota V6 supercharged engine, Lotus handling and hypercar looks all for £85,000 ish. Or Sotheby’s was offering a Lancia B20GT for about the same money… But Sid, you already have a Mini.
The device behind is a new Ineos Grenadier, Jim Ratcliffe’s Land Rover Defender replacement built at the old Hambach plant where Mercedes made Smart cars. So someone in this house is not afraid to make a very bold decision, Prime Minister.
Times move on (though looking at the Grenadier you might not think so). This is a piggery. Each of the elbow height slots lets you feed the pigs where each sow’s family has a little yard and the boar lives at the end of the row. And then they made sausages. Doris’s cousin rears outdoor free range piggies that have a nice life, not like at the 26 storey unit in China slaughtering 1.2 million pigs a year. Do read the packet before eating sausages.
Along here we are looking for dippers, chubby little dark brown fellas with white tummies. And we do. They walk under water to feed or swim with their wings as they do not have webbed feet. (See Swedish Nature-The white throated dipper www.youtube.com/watch?v=EexO1A2weSc )
Sunday sees us off to Alsop station on the Tissington Trail, now a walk but once a branch line of the London and North Western Railway. At Tideswell you left the London to Manchester line for Buxton, that glamorous English spa town so very like Baden Baden. The line was pulled up after Dr Richard Beeching’s report into the value of the rail network. All immortalised in Slow Train, by Flanders and Swann. Available on You Tube. www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6OHD2uCpfU
These are the justly famous Stepping Stones in Dovedale (under water between the trees) where the river marks the border with Staffordshire. We think The Silk can just be seen hanging off that tree in the middle. Happily our route does not require a crossing and by the miracle of Nikwax boot proofing we get home with dry socks to a warm fire.
Monday’s walk takes us from Belper on the Derwent where the river powered Strutt’s cotton spinning mills. Until very recently Courtauld’s Aristoc made stockings here for Marks and Spencers. But not any more.
We have had one wall in this story, here’s another built as the end of a Napoleonic era firing range for training the yeomanry. You can still see the bullet marks.
On the subject of military training, it was up on Derwent Water that 617 squadron‘s Lancaster crews practiced dropping bouncing bombs between the dam towers. That crankshaft made in Sheffield? It all joins up.
Is it an observatory? A smoke house? Well, sort of … the ventilation tower for the Milford tunnel. It’s on a golf course now.
And this tower housed a vertical stationary engine that powered a lift to remove spoil as they dug the tunnel. It may later have been used as a semaphore tower. Opinions vary. Nice foxgloves.
And this is the unusual semi circular styled portal of that Milford Tunnel. It is in use and we saw a very prosaic little two car commuter train.
The history of Belper’s mills is not yet exploited, though perhaps Sid overestimates the country’s appetite for economic history. Either way the town is wondering what to do with these very special buildings though there is no sign of the leadership we saw at Bethlehem in Pennsylvania, but then nor do UK towns have much political autonomy or funding.
The North Mill was a precursor to today’s sky scrapers, having an iron frame to make it fireproof – which was important because cotton powder hanging in the air was so combustible. This 1912 East Mill was first powered by wheels taking water off the lodge (local word for mill pond) created behind its own artificial weir, and later by electricity from their own turbines.
It was a very wet but joyful few days.
Then Sid and Doris go home to find that the chain of flat and house buyers has fallen apart and there must be new thinking about how to manage the move to Salisbury.
It does indeed all join up.