A place to play The Doncaster Street end of the site started recorded life (in 1860s mapping) as dense court style housing. Much of this was demolished in an early 1920s slum clearance project. The archive gives us – perhaps – a glimpse of the planning of that erasure. Here’s an annotated image of the Doncaster Arms pub, that sat on-site at the corner of Matthew Street and Doncaster Street. The pub appears already to have been shut-up, ready for demolition. The photo comes from the Council’s City Engineers’ Department’s papers, the measurements inscribed onto the image likely part of the compensation calculation for the compulsory purchase of this derelict building in the run up to its demolition. Once the pub (and 97 neighbouring houses) had gone the vacant site was repurposed as a children’s playground, the gift of city benefactor J.C. Graves, as recorded in the jubilant scene recorded in the park’s opening in 1931. Happy faces indeed, but also a glimpse of another era of social relations, a world of rank denoted by which type of hat you wore : playground opens 1931 S03839 picturesheffield Reproduced with permission of Sheffield Archives and Local Studies The playground was in its day a model, a local echo of an early Twentieth century movement to improve the physical and moral health of the working classes through the provision of equipment for recreation, a move towards the structuring of play, bringing it off the streets and into a mechanically and spatially organized play-ground. This ‘arranged-ness’ of this playground is captured well in the ‘outdoor factory’ appearance shown in this image: And at this place, there is a particular poignancy to the idea of bringing play off the streets and into a space specifically set aside for it. For what is now the HSBC offices site on the opposite side of Doncaster Street to the Furnace Park site used to be the Daniel Doncaster & Sons’ foundry. Here on Wednesday, 25th August 1886, at around 5pm the 18 feet high wall of Daniel Doncaster’s stockyard gave way, raining hundreds of tons of steel and iron bars, bricks, roofing timbers and slates out into Matthew Street, and onto a group of local children playing in the street. Eight died: Martha Armitage (aged ten), John Armitage (two), Henry Crisp (six), William Cullingworth (seven), Clifford Anderson (seven), Samuel Oates (five), William Henry Ward (five) Herbert Crookes (five). I’ve found no suggestion that the playground opened in 1931 was intended as a memorial to these children, or that it reflected particular concern about street-play in this particular inner city location. J.G. Graves set up a number of playgrounds around Sheffield around this time. The post-slum clearance open plot bounded by Matthew Street and Doncaster Street lent itself well to a philanthropist seeking a site for a modern life-enhancing playground. Also, the 1886 event and the 1931 opening ceremony were 45 years apart. Two generations. Two different phases in the life of what now is set to become Furnace Park.
Posted on: Mon, 17 Mar 2014 20:06:13 +0000