Tourist Attractions in and around Sheffield

You may remember the film "The Full Monty" now becoming a cinema classic and set in Sheffield. The difficult times of the closure of many of the heavy engineering sites the film portrays are long gone. The Sheffield of today is a thriving commercial city with two universities. The revived city centre has impressive new and restored buildings and fine public spaces.

As you travel around Sheffield one thing you cannot fail to notice is how green the city is, and how hilly! Suburban Sheffield is a great place for walking (apart from the hills!) with an extensive network of parks of varying nature. I particularly like the route from Endcliffe Park as it gradually changes from a formal civic park with a statue of Queen Victoria to end up near Ringinglow on a muddy path beside a small stream in a wooded valley. (Don't miss the Llama farm at Ringinglow).

The City is at the confluence of several rivers. They supplied the water power for the machines of the traditional manufacturing trades of cultery, steel and silverware, driving tilt-hammers, grindstones and polishing wheels. Our more recent heavy steel industries needed plenty of water too and the heritage of that is the many reservoirs around the region.

As the need for water-power died away many of the valleys became public parks and so now we have several beautiful wooded valleys reaching well into the city. The city itself has many relics of the industrial age - most of the river valleys retain the dams that were associated with the water-wheels. The best preserved are the complete scythe factory at Abbeydale Industrial Hamlet. Here you can still see how the whole process worked from melting the iron to fitting handles to the completed and sharpened blades.

In the Porter Valley is the Shepherd Wheel, (currently awaiting lottery funded major restoration) and close to the city centre is Kelham Island Industrial Museum. One sight you cannot miss there is the incredible River Don Engine under steam (but after the floods of 2007 I'm afraid you will have to wait until the clean-up is completed).

Bringing us more up to date with industry is the more recently closed Templeborough steel works, now Magna an innovative "science adventure centre". You will be awed by the cathederal-like scale of the building. In it you will find four excellent interactive science and technology zones - Earth, Air, Fire and Water. One of the original furnaces has been retained and adapted to give you an idea of the noise and fire the workers would have experienced with a live show several times a day.

Industrial history isn't for everyone and Sheffield has a lot more to offer.
The central shopping area is reviving well after suffering competition from the nearby Meadowhall shopping centre in the River Don Valley. Also in the Don Valley are indoor and outdoor stadiums and the new Sheffield Ice Skating Centre. The 1970s architecture of the well known Sheffield Crucible Theatre is supplemented by the lovingly restored Lyceum. The third major city center venue is the City Hall, also recently renovated.

Sport: We have two major football clubs, Sheffield Wednesday and Sheffield United. In the Don Valley you can watch the Sheffield Steelers ice hockey team. If you are more interested in doing than in watching then the city is exceptionally well provide with parks, many of which have the normal range of sporting facilities including golf and tennis but in Sharrow is an unusual and popular innovation - an artificial climbing rock.

When we speak of Sheffield as a destination we must not forget the surrounding region. On the western margin is the Peak District National Park. The area is popular for outdoor activities including: rock climbing, hiking, hang-gliding, horse riding and caving. For the less active there are literally dozens of delightful small towns and villages, plenty of well known ones like Bakewell, Castleton, Eyam, Tideswell but so many more and of such different characters too. Matlock Bath seems almost like a seaside town, massive cliffs behind a ribbon of town fronting onto the river, whereas Buxton, another spa town, is an architectural wonder with a Regency Crescent, the historic Opera House and, at the former Royal Devonshire Hospital, the largest unsupported dome in Britain.

Closer to Sheffield is Chatsworth House, indisputably one of the finest historic homes in the country. You will need a full day to tour the house and gardens. Indeed the gardens are so extensive that they alone constitute a good day out.
On a smaller scale, nearby, is Haddon Hall, dating back to the 12th century and remarkably well preserved.
And if 12th century habitation isn't old enough for you then visit Creswell Crags where our ancestors lived in the caves between 50,000 and 10,000 years ago. After the discovery of Britain's only Ice Age rock art in 2003 the area has undergone massive amounts of work to completely remove a road and sewage works from the valley and to build a new visitor centre opened in 2009.

With the Peak District so close it is easy to overlook the rest of the region. In particular, heading North we reach Leeds, York, Wakefield, Halifax - but the route North is itself full of interest so you may not make it all the way!