Steel City: A Time Team Special

For 'Steel City: A Time Team Special', the team followed ARCUS, the Archaeological Research and Consultancy at the University of Sheffield, on some of its excavations into Sheffield's industrial past. Early death, deadly machinery and the worst man-made disaster in British history were revealed as Time Team documented the work of the archaeologists who have spent more than six years digging through the remains of a city that was once the biggest producer of steel in the world.

The 'ugliest town in the Old World'
Sheffield, according to George Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier, 'could justly claim to be called the ugliest town in the Old World: its inhabitants, who want it to be pre-eminent in everything, very likely make that claim for it … And the stench! If at rare moments you stop smelling sulphur it is because you have begun smelling gas.'

Built on seven hills and five rivers – the Don and its four tributaries, the Loxley, Rivelin, Porter and the Sheaf – Sheffield is the biggest city in Yorkshire and the fourth biggest in England. Its population is around 600,000.

The city's hills provided it with the necessary raw materials for the industry that led to it becoming known as 'Steel City': coal, iron and millstone grit for the grinding wheels of its workshops. And its rivers provided the water power it needed in the days before steam, while its forests supplied it with plentiful supplies of wood and charcoal.

From Chaucer to Defoe
Even before the industrial revolution got under way, Sheffield was renowned for its manufacture of nails, knives, scissors, scythes, razors, axes and other metal products. It had also established its unique reputation and dominant position in the manufacture of cutlery – a virtual production monopoly that continues in Britain to this day.

Sheffield steel even gets a mention in Chaucer, who wrote of the miller of Trumpington: 'A Sheffeld thwitel baar he in his hose.' (See Sheffield steel in Chaucer.) And as early as 1724, Daniel Defoe was able to write that: 'The manufacture of hardware has increased so much that they told us that 30,000 men are employed.'

Revolutionary techniques
Then, in the 1740s, two developments took place that put Sheffield at the head of the new techniques that were to revolutionise steel production and cutlery manufacture:

Benjamin Huntsman, who operated a foundry at Handsworth, four miles to the east of Sheffield, invented the crucible steel process. (See From blister steel to crucible steel.) Huntsman's invention made it possible to produce much harder, high-quality steel in large quantities. The crucible steel process helped to increase production in Sheffield from no more than 200 tons of steel a year under the old method to more than 20,000 tons, or 40% of total European steel production, a century later.

A Sheffield cutler, Thomas Boulsover, devised a means of fusing a thin layer of silver to copper to produce silver plate the famous 'Sheffield Plate' that looked like silver but was far cheaper, and was to take silver-plated cutlery into the dining rooms of almost every middle class family in the land.

Steam and bulk production
By the end of the 18th century, there were 97 recorded water-powered wheel sites in Sheffield, compared with a third of that number at the beginning of the century. But it was the development of steam power and the bulk production of steel that led to the really massive expansion of the industry and the city in the 19th century.

In 1801, 46,000 people lived in Sheffield, a figure that had risen to 135,000 by 1851 and 409,000 in 1901. By this time, Sheffield cutlers counted for 97% of the total nationally. Sheffield's domination of the steel industry was complete.

The 'Sheffield Outrages'
Yet the success of its industry was only achieved at huge cost in human suffering and misery. Steel production involved people working long hours, with little protection, in highly unpleasant and dangerous working conditions. So much so, indeed, that Sheffield became one of the main centres for trade union organisation and agitation in the UK.

In the 1860s, the conflict between capital and labour reached new heights in the 'Sheffield Outrages'. These culminated in a series of explosions and murders carried out by union militants. According to an anarchist pamphlet, The Sheffield Outrages: Tracts for the Times:

'Sheffield, then the capital of English trade unionism, was the only town where the decrees of the union were enforced by the blowing up of factories or shooting capitalists. Nor were these outrages the peculiar invention of William Broadhead [secretary of the Saw Grinders Union, who was heavily implicated]. Like machine smashing or rick burning, they were an inheritance of the evil days of oppression and coercion.'

'When strikes are criminal offences, and unions are smashed with all the might of law, what method is there left but outrage?' asked the anarchists.

Royal Commission on Trade Unions
In 1866, the Conservative government of the day set up a Royal Commission on Trade Unions in response to the outrages. It was given 'extraordinary powers. They could give a free pardon to anyone who made a full confession, and send any man to prison who refused to answer questions or committed perjury.'

The Commission came out strongly against the unions and prompted a major clampdown on union activity. Ironically, though, it was the Commission's more pro-union Minority Report that prevailed just a few years later, leading to the trade union reform legislation introduced by the new Liberal government in 1871.

The Great Flood
The 1860s in Sheffield also witnessed the worst-ever man-made disaster in Britain: Sheffield's 'Great Flood'. On Friday 11 March, 1864, the Sheffield Waterworks Company's Dale Dyke dam, which was approaching completion after five years' construction work, collapsed.

Some 650 million gallons of water poured in a great torrent down the Loxley valley and into Sheffield, leaving an eight-mile trail of destruction in its wake. At least 240 people died in barely half an hour, and more than 100 factories and shops, 400 houses and 64 other buildings were destroyed.

Squalid terraces
While factory owners did well out of their insurance claims following the flood, ordinary workers got little or no compensation. And the houses that were built to replace those destroyed were squalid back-to-back terraces, which sprung up everywhere to accommodate Sheffield's still burgeoning population.

As George Orwell was to write in his account of Sheffield in the 1930s, 'It has a population of half a million and it contains fewer decent buildings than the average East Anglian village of five hundred.'

That, as much as anything else, was an integral part of Sheffield's industrial heritage.

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