Author

Peter Brown

Date

2012

Project Type

Undergraduate Dissertation

Subject

Historic Landscape Characterisation

Datasets

Town Plan 1:1056 (1853)

County Series 1:10560 1st Ed (1855)

County Series 1:2500 1st Rev (1905)

County Series 1:10560 2nd Rev (1906)

Ordnance Survey 1:50000 Scale Colour Raster

British Geological Survey 1:50000 (1974)

Sources: Digimap; South Yorkshire Historic Landscape Characterisation Project

Dates/Editions: See above.

Scales: 1:1056, 1:2500, 1:10560, 1:50,000

Related Subjects

History; Architecture; Geography; Local History; Anthropology; Demographic Studies; Sociology

Keywords

HLC; demography; social studies; urban studies

Publishing Institution

University of Sheffield

Summary

The report A Tale of Two Cities, The Sheffield Project (Thomas et al, 2009) presents a number of metrics which depict a clear social divide between the Eastern and Western parts of the City of Sheffield. To what extent does Landscape Archaeology help us to understand how this situation may have arisen and what are the difficulties encountered in using such an approach?

Thomas et al (2009) employed the English Indices of Deprivation to depict significant social divisions within the City of Sheffield. A Landscape Archaeology approach is adopted, using historic maps in particular, to discover the reasons for this polarity. Using housing type to identify social divisions in the landscape, urban development was plotted over a number of dates: 1850’s, 1900’s and contemporary. Class divisions in Sheffield’s landscape became particularly apparent in the early 19th century and have continued since, enhanced and fixed in the landscape by the construction of large council estates in the 20th century. Sheffield has a high proportion of council built properties denoting the political aspect of their construction. Whilst it has been argued that the rich built their houses to the south west of the city to escape the influence of the iron and steel industry, the presence of substantial coal mining activities to the east may also be a factor.

The presence of artificial boundaries in the landscape, particularly postcodes and school catchment areas, may consolidate and compound existing social divisions. The use of housing type as an indicator of status becomes less useful from the 1980’s onwards due to changing housing policies. We also examine the relevance of existing theory to Landscape Archaeology in an urban environment rejecting nostalgic views of Landscape exhibited by certain archaeologists.

Aims & Objectives

Are we able to identify when and how class divisions in evidence in the present landscape of Sheffield came into existence?

Methodology

On the basis that housing type may be used as an indicator of social status, this was recorded as follows:

• Back to back, courtyard, terrace.
• Larger terrace, semi-detached.
• Detached, larger semi-detached with own garden.
• Industrial.

1:1056 (1853) and 1:2500 (1905) plans were used for initial categorisation but due to the scale involved (the 1853 town plan of Sheffield would cover and area of some 3.6m by 5.4m if physically laid out) this was marked onto 1:10560 versions of each map using colour codes.

Results/Outcome

We took advantage of the South Yorkshire Historic Landscape Characterization to plot contemporary housing distributions as follows:

• Grid Iron Terraced Housing
• 19th to Early 20th Century Villa Suburbs
• Inter-War and Post WWII Private Developments
• Early to Mid 20th Century Municipal Suburbs
• Post WWII Municipal Suburbs
• Industrial/Commercial

However, a weakness here is that the description of ‘suburbanised rural settlements’ applied by HLC to many districts of Sheffield did not contain the level of resolution required and additional walkover surveys were necessary in order to fill in some of the missing detail.

The BGS geology map together with associated memoir and other documentation was used to plot the location of coal seams and pits throughout the Sheffield area.

References & Acknowledgements

Thomas, B., Pritchard, J., Ballas, D., Vickers, D. and Dorling, D. (2009). A Tale of Two Cities: The Sheffield Project. Available at: <http://www.sasi.group.shef.ac.uk/research/sheffield/index.html> [Accessed 08 August 2012].

Supervisor: Dr Camilla Priede, The Institute for Lifelong Learning, The University of Sheffield