I have slightly sketchy memories of my first visit to Sheffield. It was some time in the early 1980s and, having arrived off the train from Manchester with the looming presence of the Park Hill flats at our back, we passed through a dark subway from the station to the town centre. There followed a fantastic night at the John Peel Roadshow at the Leadmill, some greasy chips in the Hole in the Road, a bus trip out to a Victorian suburb, a student party, and finally watching the sun come up rotating slowly on a roundabout in a playground at the top of a hill. Sheffield seemed a smaller but much cooler version of my home town of Birmingham: concrete brutalism, student cool and fantastic music.

Those of you who have been to Sheffield in recent years will appreciate the transformation. The cool and the music are still there but the physical fabric of the city is unrecognisable from what George Orwell claimed “could justly claim to be called the ugliest town in the old world” (and that was before the brutalism).

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