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Volume 4 | Issue 3 - History in the Public Eye
Article by Sam Ellis. Edited and researched by Hayley Arnold.
The Porter Valley, leading into Sheffield from the peak district, is now very much a public space. On a sunny afternoon Endcliffe park is a hive of activity: Families in all shapes and sizes gather around the packed playground hub, where you can also find a cafe, gym equipment and ice cream. More recently, the wooded slopes have been popular with off-piste sledgers and snowboarders.
It has always been a busy scene, though not necessarily as a public park: Porter Valley was for a long time heavily industrialized. There were around twenty water wheels along the Porter Brook River in the eighteenth century, grinding corn, operating forge hammers, sharpening blades for knives and other utensils. There were skilled labourers, traders, artisans, grocery vendors and children as young as 9 or 10 working along the river.
This previous history comes as no surprise; it is the story of many fast flowing river valleys in a city which is famous worldwide for its industrial heritage and use of water power. Cutlery, like the knives grinded at Shepherd Wheel, is synonymous with Sheffield. The city’s industry may have become more specialist and small scale, but green space is so highly valued, and the Porter Valley so picturesque that it was hardly going to fall into ruin. In 1877 Endcliffe Park was opened to the public on commemoration of Queen Victoria’s jubilee, landscaped by William Goldring who also shaped the Kew Gardens.
The valley’s two very different histories are tremendously interwoven. How the park is used as a public space, how our use of the valley battles with the natural world and how the public engage with the history on display in the valley are all determined by five centuries of industry.
The workshops along the porter brook were just one component of a larger Sheffield industrial community. Grinders would forge their metal elsewhere, than carry them to the valley workshops for sharpening. The parks along the Porter Valley nowadays are criss-crossed with footpaths, and make up a large chunk of the Sheffield Round Walk, a fourteen mile loop through the city’s plentiful green spaces.
The ‘Friends of Porter Valley’ manage its industrial heritage. They maintain the walls, paths and Shepherd Wheel exhibition, which was brilliantly restored in 2011. Like the worker making their way along the valley, the modern day visitor passes information boards, paths up to various workshop sites and monuments, all the while accompanied by the sounds of the river and human activity. In this respect, the long standing use of the valley as a thoroughfare determines how the visitor interacts with this history, like the workers and traders they are free to pick and choose. If we were to regard the valley as an open-air museum, it would be an ideal layout to families with children who tire easily, being under no obligation to shuffle through room after room.
However, walking the valley hasn’t always been a stroll in the park, and still isn’t that simple. In fact the very project of industry along the Porter Brook, to tame nature, was never complete. Controlling the river and harnessing its power was how the wheels turned. This could be done by a lever within the workshop, allowing water to flow in and out of dam complexes. This is deceptive; the workshops’ operations were always subject to dry spells in the summer, and much labour would be spent trying to break ice in the winter. Even now, ice closes the parks, the fords become impassable after heavy rain, and the same river in which children paddle in the summer becomes violent, a torrent of high water disappearing under Hunters Bar roundabout.
Experiences of the space can be very different depending on your approach to it. If you were to walk in from the hills, the man-made weirs and inlets would become more frequent, a car might roar past over a bridge, the parks become crowded and noisy as you approach the rows of terraced houses. It becomes a walk out of the country and into a city. Alternatively, if you were to walk out from Ecclesall road the parks get wilder, from the landscaped Endcliffe through Whitely Woods until ultimately the concrete paths are halted by a wetlands reserve. Nature ultimately gets in the way.
However you choose to engage with the history on offer along the Porter Valley, it's well worth a visit!
On 22nd February 1944 a US Air Force B-17 Flying Fortress was hit whilst on an air raid of a German occupied air base in Denmark. The pilot tried to navigate the plane back to their base in Northamptonshire but crashed next to the playing fields of Endcliffe Park killing all 10 crew members. A memorial stands at the site of the crash surrounded by 10 American oak trees, one for each crew member.
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