It’s 1974 and only two cities exist: London and Sheffield

By Sophie Atkinson

Philip Hensher’s Sheffield-set novel The Northern Clemency was published back in 2008. In terms of timings, this should make it feel uniquely irrelevant: neither old enough to merit a second look, nor recent enough to warrant devouring for the novelty of it. Yet reread it today and you’ll find something unexpected. Though its narrative spans 1974 to the mid 90s, the novel feels more timely than ever in one key way — namely, in pre-empting Sheffield as a city increasingly populated by Londoners.

The Northern Clemency may be vast in scope and ambition (over 700 pages, three decades, a small army of minor characters), but for the most part, it focuses on two families living on “Rayfield Avenue”. The details about the street’s location suggest it is probably a made-up name for Moorbank Road in Crosspool. There is a local family, the Glovers, and a family who move in across the road from them, the Sellers, who have relocated from London. 

For the most part, Hensher details a 1970s-90s Sheffield that’s rarely immortalised in print: one populated by locals who are middle class and largely apolitical. The London family, the Sellers, is headed by Bernie, who works for “the Electricity”, while the Glovers’ patriarch, Malcolm, works in a building society (and whose wife, who doesn’t need to work for the salary, takes a part-time job in a florists). 

There is a contrarian bent that guides the writing, where the thing you expect to happen doesn’t play out. A teenage boy and girl meet, seem intrigued and excited by one another — and that’s it. They become friends, nothing more. An obnoxious teenager heads to the miners’ strike and doesn’t get his head bashed in by the police. A husband vanishes — perhaps some tragedy has taken place? He returns quietly days later. We see this same insistence on nuance with the five Londoners who populate the novel. Instead of being held up as symbols of gentrification or used to tut-tut about how provincial Sheffield is compared to the capital, Hensher suggests that (largely) this intra-city mingling is a very good thing. That both the Londoners and the locals are happier, more expansive and more human for meeting one another. 

If you’ve ever moved elsewhere — to another city, say, or abroad — your brain often feels radically different in the early months. It’s like hitting a switch and life going from black and white to technicolour. Mundane details suddenly feel vivid: your walk home from the bus stop, the cereal aisle in the supermarket. One striking aspect of the novel is in seeing Sheffield with the intensity of an outside perspective. When the Sellers take the train from London to Sheffield, we get the sense that the North is crafted out of a different material: the land feels more solid after the fluff of the South.

“The soft green of the southern counties, too, had gone, with the cows and sheep, and now harder, more purposeful facts were looming across the landscape. A herd of vast-waisted cooling towers, steaming massively; a terrain untended, brown and barren; one town after another with no name, just a mass of black and brown smoke and soot.”

Unlike the Sellers’ previous experience of the countryside, Sheffield’s surrounding nature isn’t ornamental, but wild. The family climbs down into a valley “where some terrible catastrophe seemed to have occurred, and about a stream, plummeting and plunging, black rocks were littered, huge and cuboid.” Later they come across a dead sheep, “lying there, half in the stream, its mouth open, its fleece filthy and stinking with flies. In Surrey it would have been tidied away.”

A city is a subjective thing, Hensher insists. We see two radically different versions of Sheffield through the Glovers’ son Francis’s eyes: the city he sees when holidaying there before the family relocates, one of “hotels and attentive waiters, of dense Victorian villas dispersed through a verdant forest, breaking out like the frilled edges of amateur maternal pancakes into lavender moorland”. On arrival, this is replaced by the daily-life version, “this stinking black city of vast boxes and artificial black hills and unattended vast machinery.”

Perhaps you bristle reading that last description. The narrator does too, arguing Francis is too scared and selfish to recognise the sight for what it is — the grandeur of Sheffield’s “last phase of its industrial greatness”. This authorial reaction preempts the many local reactions to follow. Because in this novel, the mere presence of a Londoner in Sheffield is a provocation. 

Even their not being there ruffles feathers. In the first scene of the book, Malcolm’s wife Katherine hosts a party. She’s never done this for her neighbours before, who we learn were mostly puzzled by the invitation, “knowing the couple and their three children only by sight”. But as the night progresses, the action seems more shaped by the Londoners who don’t attend than the locals who do. Katherine is publicly disappointed by the Sellers’ nonappearance, but she’s privately devastated that her boss at the florists she works part-time in, Nick — from London — hasn’t shown up either. Even though the party comes off perfectly, for Katherine, it’s a failure: “All evening she’d felt impatient with her guests who, by stooping to attend, had shown themselves to be not quite worth knowing.”

Actually, the Sellers are no posher than most of the other families on the street. All the same, the neighbours seem to operate under the assumption that they are a cut above them, even before they’ve met them: “The Sellerses were going to be smart London people. That was absolutely clear.” Similarly, there’s Nick, who Katherine Glover reads as upper class when he explains that he’s set up his florists using family money. In reality, he’s a petty criminal whose boss is laundering heroin money through the shop. Since all of the Londoners seem to be perceived by the locals as uniformly posh, their presence becomes a sort of litmus test for how each local character reacts to feelings of insecurity around their own class.

For Katherine, class insecurity spurs on a distaste for the life she’s led up until this point. Working for Nick leads to her forcing her kids and husband to go on a day trip to the countryside. When quizzed on why, instead of citing the usual suspects (fresh air, lovely views, a gentle walk) she is honest with them: it will be a nice thing to say to… people. Not just Nick, but also Nick.

“‘The point is,’ Katherine said, her voice lowered and slow, she might have been passing on a moral lesson, ‘don’t you think it would be nice if someone, Nick for instance, Mr Reynolds, said to me on a Monday morning, “What did you get up to at the weekend?” And I could say – or it could be your teacher, it could be anyone – instead of “Not much,” or “Mucked about”, or “Washed some socks,” I could say, “We had a lovely day out in Derbyshire.”

Similarly eccentric is the behaviour of Andrea, another Rayfield Avenue resident, on drinking tea with Alice Sellers. To Alice’s confusion, Andrea regales her with story after story of her visits to London for occasions of state — royal weddings and funerals — and even produces a scrapbook full of mementos, possibly the only thing duller to leaf through than a neighbour’s holiday snaps. Presumably she’s trying to craft an patina of cosmopolitanism for herself in comparison to the other locals — the irony being that neither Alice nor any Londoner she knows would ever dream of attending such an event. 

Perhaps the strangest possible reaction to the presence of a Londoner in the novel is that of Miss Barker, a teacher, who perceives shy schoolboy Francis Sellers as the embodiment of North-South inequality. She dislikes him from the get go, never using his name, and only referring to him as “our new friend from London”. When she mistakenly believes she’s caught him vandalising his desk with a pen, she snaps:

…before he could have said anything she was off on a flourish of triumphant unfairness about people from London, yes, London, who don’t think we have anything worth respecting in the North, and in a moment, like a jubilant coda to a stupendously enlarged symphonic movement, Miss Barker’s understanding of the nation’s historical divide into North and South, oppression of labour by the effete, exemplified for the moment by the prevalence of pork butchers, the honourable trades of coal mining and steel manufacturing and one ten-year-old boy.

It’s hard not to wonder if Hensher is mining his own biography in parts like these — like the Sellers children, Francis and his sister Sandra, he relocated as a child from London to Sheffield. Indeed, The Northern Clemency’s weirdest aspect — that the universe of the novel only seems to permit for the existence of two cities, London and Sheffield — feels like a reflection of the black-and-white thinking most kids are prone to. Even when the novel finally concedes that a third city exists — Sydney, Australia — Sandra can only size it up in relation to… you’ve guessed it. “When she first arrived,” the narrator tells us breathlessly, “she had thought immediately that this city was like a Sheffield that had died and gone to heaven.”

In The Guardian, Hensher wrote about the memory that was the jumping off point for writing The Northern Clemency — a playground game he remembered from the winter of 1974-75. It had grown increasingly popular: first a small group played it, then a large group, then half the school, before it disappeared. “What were the rules? Only the memory of that passion had stuck, and a sense of people who were included and those who were excluded. It was the sort of thing a novel could investigate.” This same game is woven into the novel — but the second part of this, an exploration of inclusion and exclusion, feels a more important part of the book. It’s one Hensher seems most fond of examining via the binary of London and Sheffield. 

Because it’s funny, isn’t it? Despite the bowing and scraping and bragging and bullying the Sheffielders show the Londoners, it’s the Sellers children who seem the most desperate to be included. In easily the most excruciating part of the book, Francis commits two cardinal sins in a row — when asked at lunch which football team he supports, he concedes he “doesn’t know”. Then, on asking for the tomato sauce, he attempts “to erode the improper Southern noise in his voice” — to say the word tomato as a Northerner might. “But he didn’t know; the a wouldn’t go easily into a short a, like one in ‘castle’ or ‘bath’ or ‘pass’, and it came out wrong, ridiculous and apologetic.” Southerners have been run out of town for less.

The demographics of today’s Sheffield makes this aspect of the novel feel especially vivid. At the end of last year, my colleague Daniel Timms dissected the data from the Office of National Statistics’ 2021 census to analyse where new arrivals were coming from. Ostensibly, most people who are new in town hail from Rotherham. But as Daniel later observes, London doesn’t show up on the top ten list of local authorities that people relocate to Sheffield from because it’s divided into 32 boroughs. However, if you take the whole of Greater London together, it rockets to the top of the list — having sent 2,276 people to this city (and yes, Daniel concedes it’s not a perfect comparison — obviously Greater London is more populous than anywhere on that list). Increasingly, Sheffield is a city populated by ex-Londoners.

Daniel’s same article showed that more people were moving to Sheffield from London than vice versa — when you subtract the Sheffield residents who move to London from that total, you end up with a gain of 886 people from the capital. This is a trend which feels alien to the world of the novel. The Northern Clemency opens in the 70s, when there would have been far more people moving from the industrial North to London than the reverse. Arguably, both the Sellers and Nick are bucking that trend by their moves (and as we later discover of Nick — he hasn’t moved willingly, but is forced to relocate there by his criminal boss). Nowadays, for Londoners in cramped and expensive accommodation, Sheffield is seen as an aspirational place to live. 

So it’s reassuring, perhaps, to see how much joy the locals get from the new arrivals — not because they’re from London, specifically, but because their status as outsiders creates more wiggle room. It’s no coincidence that in Katherine Glover’s most humiliated moment, she doesn’t open up about her shameful secret to the neighbours she’s lived cheek by jowl with for years, but to Alice on her first day living on the street. Perhaps it’s the freedom of having someone to chat to who has no preconceived notion of you.

Similarly, Daniel Glover, the neighbourhood lothario, comes up short when he meets Alice’s daughter Sandra. He’s used to his reputation and good looks preceding him — of seduction followed by an abrupt jilting — but Sandra, unaware of his buzzy reputation at school, doesn’t seem much interested in any of that. Instead, she becomes his first female friend, and the first person he seems able to really talk to in the book.  

When we first meet Katherine, she’s in a state of stultifying boredom. She’s an unhappy housewife who goes shopping every day and has a cup of tea on her own each day just to avoid the claustrophobia of the daily toil in the house. Her fascination with Nick and her new part-time job seem to reset something in her. She starts to think about the life she wants to have and why her relationship with her husband matters to her, rather than living on autopilot.

What the Londoners gain is far clearer: the joy of Sheffield itself. The book is good at evoking the seductiveness of a place where the boundaries between city and country are blurry at best. The moors lie at the bottom of their road, with a huge limestone rock with a crack running through it large enough for the local kids and teenagers to wriggle through — an adult-free paradise for smoking, snogging, and writing poetry. When, early on in the novel, after having a bad few weeks, Sandra expresses dislike for her new home, her friend Daniel gives the mental equivalent of a shrug. Soaking up the sweetness of the air and gazing along the road to the beauty of the moors, he can’t take her remark seriously: “It wasn’t to be hated, this place.”

Ultimately, a vein of anxiety cuts through this book: what if, by being around the Londoners, we became like them? The migrants from the capital are considered mardy, stuck up, inauthentic, and are burdened with unforgivable accents. So it’s funny that towards the end of the book, Hensher seems to signal a very different future for the city through the two Glover brothers — one where Sheffield skews closer to London in the decades to come. 

By the end of the novel, younger brother Tim, who has always seemed so wedded to the old, industrial Sheffield, meets with some bad luck. His brother Daniel — who has far less romantic notions of the city — ends up making a success of a new venture. In an old abandoned building, he sets up a dance school with a restaurant-slash-bar on the top. Thanks to Daniel’s new business, his retired miner father-in-law gets to pursue the job he apparently always dreamed of — as a ballroom dancing teacher. In both Hensher’s vision and in reality, Sheffield jobs that were once largely in mining and manufacturing were being replaced by service industry ones — the same jobs that make up so much of London’s workforce. Although Hensher recognises Sheffield’s industrial grandeur, he doesn’t seem to have the same nostalgia about it as other writers. Instead, he seems cautiously hopeful about the way the city has modernised.

As the book closes, the dreaded 80s are over, and the 90s are well underway. There’s now a new way to get on in Sheffield, and it looks a lot more like the London way of doing things. The question Hensher leaves us with is this: is that such a bad thing?