How Sheffield’s trees got under our skin

“In this extensive habitation, nature dwells in her loveliest garb. Here is to be found the antidote to the poison of town life.”

— On the opening of Ecclesall Woods to the public, Yorkshire Telegraph and Star, 23 August, 1928

It’s an article of faith in Sheffield that we live in the greenest city in Europe. The city, we are often told, has 4.5 million trees, around eight for every human being fortunate enough to live here. Some of this, whisper it, might actually stem from the fact that around a third of Sheffield lies within the Peak District. We are, after all, the only major city which contains a national park within its city boundary. But that is only part of the story. Sheffield’s urban areas are unusually green compared with other cities. Just look at it. The giant Greno Woods in the north and Ecclesall Woods in the south are two of the most obvious. But when you add it all up, Sheffield has tree coverage of 18.4%, rising to 21.6% in the urban areas. That’s more than double the national average of 10%; our claim to be the city of trees is well-founded.

In the nineteenth century, the Victorians built great public parks to democratise access to nature. And when suburbs like Nether Edge were being laid out for Sheffield’s burgeoning middle class from the 1850s, an urban forest of street trees were planted to bring the woods even further into the city and right into the places where people lived and worked. These now mature trees were famously the cause of a years-long arboreal war which pitted a huge multinational corporation who wanted to chop 17,500 of them down against local communities who wanted to save them. 

All of which is to say that Sheffield and trees go way back. But how to tell the full story? The J. G. Graves Woodland Discovery Centre in Ecclesall Woods seems like a good place to start. As I arrive, a smattering of retired folk drink lattes before setting off with their clattering walking poles. Inside the centre, which is built with wood sourced from the trees which surround it, an information board tells me the area contains 142 hectares of ancient woodland that have existed since the 16th century. 

Setting off onto one of the trails some of the leaves are on the turn but the wood is still a sea of green. Runners zoom past too fast for me to speak to, but after Bruce, a portly Jack Russell, shows an interest in my shoe, I take the chance to speak to his human. It turns out Bruce’s owner actually used to work for the council’s parks department and makes sure she comes here once a week. “These are the premier woods in Sheffield and are really well looked after,” she says. “There are always lots of runners and dog walkers; families on the weekend. It’s just really peaceful. There’s nowhere else like it.”

Further on, excitable cockapoo Eddie provides me an opportunity for another impromptu interview. Eddie’s owner used to live near Ecclesall Woods but still comes back even though she has moved further away. Like Bruce’s owner she makes sure she comes at least once a week and says she enjoys the changing seasons, the birdsong, and walking here with her family, especially her grandson, who she says “absolutely loves it”. But more than all that, Eddie’s owner seems to value the peace of mind it brings her. “There was one moment, I remember like it was yesterday,” she says. “It was raining and it was just beautiful listening to the rain. It’s like mindfulness. I just thought ‘listen to that’.”

There’s a timeless quality to Ecclesall Woods, like these trees have been here for millennia. But that’s not really true. Rather than representing a return to a more “natural state”, woods are in fact a man-made feature. I learn this from Professor Ian Rotherham, who is taking a group on a tour of Graves Park to highlight efforts which have been made to improve its biodiversity. Sure, trees and forests have existed for thousands of years but it was only in the medieval period that woods began to spring up. Before that, he tells me the landscape would have been something called “wood pasture”, a mosaic-like patchwork of trees and open pasture land which was the product of early land management techniques used throughout Western Europe. 

However, as the population grew during the Middle Ages, so did the number of animals. Given the chance, these cattle like nothing more than to graze on trees so people began to build walls to protect them, and when they are protected they get names; Rollestone Wood, Wheata Wood, Chancet Wood and so on.

Ian Rotherham says this process of protecting and naming illustrates just how important wood was to people in the Middle Ages. “To a pre-industrial, pre-petrochemicals society, woodland landscapes are absolutely vital for your survival,” he says. “Almost everything is coming from the wood; timber, fuel and tools. You are living off the land — literally.” In Sheffield, he adds, wood was especially important due to our tool making industry, which can be traced back to Domesday in 1086.

At that point, woods were a working landscape. The trees would be heavily managed by techniques like coppicing — cutting trees or shrubs down to ground level to encourage new shoots to grow from the base — which as well as wood for tools would have provided both fuel and animal feed. As we walk around Graves Park, he points out evidence for this in the landscape. Ancient ditches, banks and hedges show where the woodlands of the past were protected from hungry animals, while the remnants of places where fuels like white coal and charcoal were produced can still be seen, if you know where to look.

In all, 80 of Sheffield’s 180 woods are classified as ancient woodlands, meaning they have been continuously covered by trees since at least 1600. Rotherham tells me that people used to think we didn't have many ancient woods in Sheffield due to the age of the trees, which are sometimes only about 200 years old. But we now know from the archives that the Victorians planted these relatively younger trees on the site of woods that had actually existed for much longer, sometimes by as much as another 400 years. Much of this archival work was done by one of Ian’s friends and predecessors, geographer Professor Mel Jones, who died in 2021. “Mel found evidence from the 1500s, the 1600s and the 1700s,” he says. “He found the payment slips used to buy the timber and references to the number of pints that were drunk to celebrate.” It’s pleasing to know that some things don’t change at least. Thanks largely to the work of Jones, we now know that Sheffield has more ancient woodland than any other industrial city in Western Europe; another feather in our cap, or perhaps nest.

But the role of woodlands in Sheffield’s industrial boom is often unacknowledged. They were the fourth key ingredient in the city’s transformation into a steel-making powerhouse, along with fast rivers, coal and ironstone. “Trees and woods allowed us to make charcoal which allows us to smelt iron,” Rotherham says. “They were vital to the growth of the city.”

Woodlands today serve a totally different function. The idea that something that had hitherto had been working landscape could be used for pleasure first took root in the 1500s and 1600s (strictly limited to the aristocracy, of course). Then, the 1800s and beginning of the Victorian era democratised the idea of spending time in nature.

The nineteenth century saw the birth of Sheffield Botanical Gardens, Norfolk Heritage Park and Sheffield General Cemetery, all created as ways to provide access to nature for ordinary people as well as the great and good. Graves Park itself was bought for the city of Sheffield by philanthropist J.G. Graves in the 1920s. By this time, any remnants of the park as a working landscape had gone to be replaced by promenading, and romance. As Rotherham takes us round the park, he points out marks and writing that have been made in the bark, many by sweethearts wanting to immortalise their love. “Tyler and Maxine 2011,” reads one of the more recent ones, but there are also marks which were carved by US servicemen billeted to Sheffield and their sweethearts during the Second World War. “Earlier on in my career this would have been seen as vandalism,” says Ian Rotherham. “Now we think of them as ‘tree stories’.”

Trees under threat

So how does a city with such an existential relationship with its trees respond when they come under threat? This was put to the test when an intransigent council became hell bent on destroying thousands of healthy trees and replacing them with inferior substitutes. If that sounds familiar, I’m not referring to the infamous Sheffield tree protest of the 2010s, but another which took place almost 50 years ago. In the 1970s, Sheffield City Council proposed to clear, fell and re-plant Ecclesall Woods with exotic red oaks as a park. The public outcry which followed led to the establishment of the Amenity Woodlands Advisory Group, and the city's woodland strategies and South Yorkshire Forest followed from that.

Memories of the more recent tree protests will be fresher; indeed, you may still be receiving therapy. Between 2016 and 2018, the city descended into an arboreal war that made headlines across the world. The Tribune has written about this extensively, from our story about the enfants terribles of the tree campaign, Calvin Payne and Simon Crump, to the piece about The Felling, the documentary that was made about the protests by Jacqui Bellamy and Eve Wood.

Camilla Allen is an academic and author based at the University of Sheffield. The Politics of Street Trees, the 2022 book she edited alongside Jan Woudstra, was partly inspired by the tree protests. But it also includes the history of how and why Sheffield’s extensive urban forest came into existence. One of the main flash points of the tree protests was Nether Edge, whose tree-lined streets were designed by Sheffield Botanical Gardens designer Robert Marnock to look like Boston, Massachusetts. Later, in the early 20th century, town planning pioneer Patrick Abercrombie wrote a plan for the city which envisaged long tree-lined parkways stretching out from the centre of the city to the moors. Not all of Abercrombie’s vision was enacted, but ribbons like the parks in the Porter Valley and more recently Sheaf Valley Park show what he had in mind. 

Allen tells me she’s lucky that her office in the architecture and landscape department at the University of Sheffield’s Arts Tower provides stunning panoramic views across the city and is one of the best places to fully appreciate how green the city really is. “Looking out I often think it’s extraordinary that there is a city nestled within all this green,” she says. “All the parks, the gardens and the street trees. It is quite special.”

One of the chapters Allen contributed to the book was about the trees of Western Road in Crookes. These were planted towards the end of the Great War to act as a place of remembrance for families who were never able to bury their relatives' bodies. But Allen says that they also acted as a form of civic amelioration; to act as a counterbalance to the increasing industrialisation of the city. “Trees have an environmental and ecological significance,” she says. “But these had a cultural and almost a spiritual significance as well.” In the febrile atmosphere of the tree campaign, it is unsurprising that these particular trees became a cause célèbre for the campaigners when they were threatened with felling.

The Politics of Street Trees was launched two years ago by veteran Sheffield politician David Blunkett, who also wrote the foreword. At the launch, Blunkett talked about growing up in the Sheffield of the 1950s and how the city’s parks made its natural heritage accessible to all. For Allen, the Sheffield tree protests took this further and “fundamentally changed the way we think about democratic access to one of the most accessible forms of nature we have”. 

What does the future look like for Sheffield’s trees? Trees can be given protected status after someone applies to the council to introduce a tree preservation order (TPO). These often succeed — after all, which councillor wants to be seen as not in favour of tree protection? Once a tree has a TPO it's much harder for it to be taken down — explicit council permission is needed. If you decide to ignore this and just take it down anyway, there's a hefty fine — up to £20,000 per tree.

In Sheffield, TPOs are not evenly distributed. As the map above shows, most are to the west of the city centre, though there are significant clusters to the north, and the south east. In the ward of Dore and Totley there are 212 protected trees, but between them, the four wards of Burngreave, Firth Park, Shiregreen and Brightside, and Southey have none. This isn't because they simply don't have trees; coverage is quite high in some of these wards. It may be a result of development pressures being lower — TPOs are often set up when people worry they might be lost in a new development soon. And it may be because in less affluent parts of the city, there are fewer people who have the time and familiarity with local systems to lobby the council about tree protection.

Back at Graves Park, Ian Rotherham takes the group to one last sight. “It’s a stunner,” he says, standing under an oak tree which he reckons is about 450 years old. At least two metres wide at its base and a good 60 ft tall, the tree is awe-inspiring to behold; our answer to Sherwood Forest’s Major Oak or the Giant Redwoods of Northern California. Ian tells me that Graves Park was once full of large oaks, but unfortunately, with old age and lightning strikes there aren’t that many of them left. If we want to have them in the future we need to be planting new ones and managing the ones we have better.

On the way back to the Charles Ashmore car park, I ask Ian a leading question. Could there be a common thread that links our ancient arboreal heritage to the tree protests; something in our DNA that made people here determined not to lose the nature on their doorstep? “People here are very proud of their environmental credentials,” he says. “And they care about their trees.” 

In some ways, he notes, the campaign to save Ecclesall Woods in the 1970s could represent an early precursor to the more celebrated tree protests of the 2010s. Like threads of mycelium climbing up inside the bark of an ash or oak, Sheffield’s trees have got under our skin.

Many thanks to David Bocking for providing several of the photos for this piece. To read David’s newsletter, click here.