Living on the edge

Good morning members — and welcome to Thursday’s Tribune.

A week ago, the Sunday Times named the Sheffield suburb of Nether Edge as one of the 10 best places to live in the North. Being Sheffielders (whether by birth or adoption) we have a tendency to be diffident in the face of such praise. But the area must be doing something right — a “happy community” where all the baristas know your name was how the paper described it. (Admittedly the list is somewhat confusing. “Leeds” also features, at the top of the list.) But away from the lazy stereotypes, what is it really like to live in Nether Edge? And is the area’s increasing trendiness (among Sheffielders and non-Sheffielders alike) threatening to spoil its unique vibe? Earlier this week, Dan headed down to find out.

Editor’s note: For me, journalism is about going to places and talking to people. Earlier this week, I spent almost a full day walking around Nether Edge, speaking to dozens of people and really trying to get a feel for the place. It’s the kind of reporting that’s becoming a dying art, as journalists with strict targets for page views spend all day chained to their desks churning out content. One of the reasons I set up The Tribune three years ago was to do a kind of reporting that is more enjoyable for me as a writer as well as for the reader. To support a different kind of local journalism, and read today’s piece in full, join The Tribune today.

Your Tribune briefing

👶 Our weekend read about fostering was one of the most impactful stories we’ve ever published. An update to that piece: we hear there was little surprise among the city’s foster carers that councillors on the education, children and families policy committee on Tuesday approved the recommendations from management involving a huge pay cut to new carers. At present new foster carers get a ‘skills payment’ of between £9,620 and £6,500 a year to live on, depending on the age of the child placed with them, along with an allowance for the child to cover some of the expenses involved. The new policy signed off on Tuesday will pay them just £1,000 for their first year with a foster child (the child’s allowance remains).

After losing four times more foster carers every year than it can recruit, it’s unclear to us (and to existing foster carers) how the plan approved at the meeting will encourage more people to sign up to help look after the city’s vulnerable children. The new policy is to encourage new carers to work though a large and infuriatingly repetitive document ‘The National Minimum Standards’ to ensure they have completed and understood their training, upon which they will receive an extra £1,500 ‘bonus’, thus achieving a pay cut of just 72/75%, rather than 85/90%.

Jane, one of the foster carers we spoke to for our recent article, says she and her colleagues feel “angry and unheard” and adds she’d like to arrange a meeting to help councillors understand the situation. The justification given for the pay cut (and current wages of a fraction of the minimum wage) was that the rates paid by Sheffield Council are "competitive with other (nearby) local authorities". “So what the committee is saying,” said one foster carer, “is since Rotherham and Barnsley don’t pay our foster carers enough to live on, we don’t have to either.”

📢 Sheffield Council has banned outdoor billboards and panels from selling “unhealthy and climate-busting” products, report Now Then. The policy will apply to advertising locations owned by the council, including 17 large panels and billboards and 129 smaller advertising panels managed for the city by the companies JCDecaux and ClearChannel. However, some campaigners believe Sheffield should go further and make the city entirely ad-free.

🚌 Two weeks ago we polled readers about what colour Sheffield’s buses should be if they are brought back into public control, and green was the clear favourite. On Tuesday, the council unveiled the new Sheffield Connect buses — which are green. The brand new fleet of four fully-electric, zero-emission buses will replace the service’s two current minibuses and will take passengers on two separate routes around the city centre, completely for free.

Things to do

🚲 Sheffield Urban CX return to the iconic Park Hill flats on Saturday to offer a hill climb event with a difference, as the second edition of Park Hill Uprise brings the action back to the area’s historic cobbles (11am-3.30pm). Entries are still open for people who want to join in, but if you just want to come to cheer on the riders that’s fine too. In this year’s event, there’ll be male and female categories, Bromptoneers, junior riders and the cargo bike challenge.

🎻 Join the Sheffield Symphony Orchestra and soloist Ben Powell at High Storrs School on Saturday for a colourful concert of work by Franz Liszt, Amy Beach and Jean Sibelius, three composers who all experienced synaesthesia, a condition where music and colours become become mixed. Tickets are £12.50 (£10.50 concessions, £6.50 for students and children) and doors open at 7.30pm. Tickets can be bought on the door or via the orchestra’s website.

🍅 In perfect timing for today’s piece, the next Nether Edge Farmers’ Market takes place this Sunday (12pm-4pm). On the day there will be around 50-60 stalls and a full programme of entertainment, while many local Nether Edge shops and businesses will be open as well including Wickwire, Oxfam, Zeds Wholefoods, Kollective Kitchen, St Luke’s Boutique, Bench, Nether Edge Bowling Club, The Byron, Edge Dental and Cafe#9. All stall fees go to charity.

Living on the edge

Seeing the tarpaulin laid out in front of the pizza shop, I feared the worst. Nether Edge was in the grip of a shooting spree, with six taking place in the area in just a few months, all thought to be connected to the local drug trade. And on 24 July 2020, I was being sent out to cover yet another. The shape was indistinct, but what else could it be but a person’s body? Firing up my phone for a Facebook Live, I readied myself to tell the readers of my former employers The Star some troubling news when a message came over our staff WhatsApp group. “It’s a dead dog!”

A dog had been shot dead the previous night. I felt not quite relieved, but certainly grateful it was not as tragic as I’d expected. Looking around, it was a bizarre scene. Customers walked past clutching sourdough loaves from Forge Bakehouse, while others sipped espressos outside Bragazzis and peered into the window at the high-end patisserie Gilt. All the while, over the other side of the road, police officers guarded a cordon around a tarpaulin under which I now knew was a dog’s body.

Abbeydale Road is a part of Sheffield that has always fascinated me — the border between middle-class Nether Edge and the less salubrious Lowfield, where two very different parts of the city meet. Hence the sourdough bakeries on one side of the road and the pizza takeaways on the other. The sense of division has long been known, but the spate of shootings in summer 2020 brought the divide into sharper relief.

Fast forward almost four years and an area which in 2020 was being described in comments on The Star’s Facebook page as a “crime-ridden hellhole” has just been named as one of the best places to live in the North by the Sunday Times. The newspaper describe a “happy community with cosy coffee shops where the barista knows your name” and neighbourhood-wide yard sales in front of Victorian houses that have been “upgraded with Farrow and Ball olive greens and soft taupes”. The area also has some of the best schools in the region, they add. Unsurprisingly, the six shootings don’t get a mention.

Lists like the one which appeared in the Sunday Times are always a bit questionable — more an exercise in filling up space in a voluminous Sunday paper than any objective assessment of an area’s quality. But Nether Edge is clearly doing something right. S7 is one of the most desirable postcodes in the city, and increasingly has property prices to match. According to Rightmove, over the last year the average price for a terrace here was £294,960, while an average semi was £373,942. House prices in Nether Edge and Sharrow have gone up by 38% in just the last five years. 

Jumping in the car (sorry, I probably should have walked or cycled), I make the 10-minute drive from Park Hill round the ring road and down London Road. I know the area reasonably well from reporting in Sheffield for six years, but I wanted to know what is so great about Nether Edge that people are prepared to ignore the occasional bout of gang warfare and mortgage themselves to the hilt to live there.