As I amble through a wide expanse of scrubby grassland, the cotton tail of a rabbit bounds up a bank in front of me. The site I’m on is surrounded by a curtain of young birches, and tall South American pampas grasses are dotted around its centre. If I hadn’t just driven here, I might think I’m in a beautiful nature reserve in the countryside, but the low rumble of traffic in the background tells a different story.
This is the site of a former steel factory, just a stone’s throw from Meadowhall. It’s an example of how nature, if given a chance, can turn a former industrial site into something of ecological value. At the same time, it’s a brownfield site with excellent transport links — a prime development opportunity, if you ever saw one. In the face of the climate emergency, some ecologists feel we need to adjust our relationship to empty sites like this and others around the country. But will the site’s owners agree?
I’ve driven past this site hundreds of times before, but I’d never given it a second thought until recently, when I saw an Instagram post by famed landscape gardener and University of Sheffield academic Nigel Dunnett. In it, a group of young people stride through a lush green field full of tall grasses and wildflowers. “An urban prairie,” is how Dunnett described it on Instagram. In a “totally spontaneous and unmanaged” way, he said the site has created a “perfect ecotone”, from woodland through to woodland edge, scattered scrub and open grassland.
But to many ecologists, this is the “wrong sort” of nature, full of plants and trees that have little relationship with native habitats of the countryside. Because the site breaks the rules, it isn't recognised as having any meaningful value. Dunnett, however, disagrees. He accepts that it is artificial, but thinks this could — and perhaps should — be the urban nature of the future. He calls it “Future Nature”.
Dunnett thinks that if people were told some celebrity landscape gardener had designed the site, people would be flocking to it. “It’s beautiful and spontaneous; a patchwork of things that have come together,” he says over the phone from his office at the university. “Sites like this are scary to a lot of ecologists as they don’t conform to the nature we all understand. But it’s the right fit for this place. Of equal value to ancient woodland and ancient meadow.”
The idea of reclaiming land from heavy industry is fashionable at the moment. In his 2020 book The Accidental Countryside: Hidden Havens for Britain’s Wildlife, Stephen Moss visits dozens of former industrial sites that have been reclaimed for nature, from a former oil refinery-turned-nature reserve in Essex, to a 19th-century Scottish lime workings which is now a haven for orchids. We’ve done it here in Sheffield as well: after it was a coal mining site called Deep Pits, Manor Fields was best known for the number of burnt-out cars it contained, but is now one of the best parks in the city.
Could the same thing happen at the Meadowhall site? That’s a decision for the site’s current owners, which, as of May this year, is Norges Bank Investment Management, or the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund. They will surely see it as a development site, on which yet another drive-through Costa could potentially be built. Whatever happens, sites like this and others around the country pose important questions. Empty industrial sites are a reminder of jobs lost, with nothing taking their place. But with nature under threat from climate change, should we be thinking about ‘value’ in terms that go beyond economic?
Dunnett’s teaching commitments prevent him from showing me around, but Gerry Firkins from the Sorby Natural History Society offers to give me the tour. As it happens he’s just been asked to survey the site for St Andrew’s Botanic Gardens, as part of a project to study the impact of climate change on human-influenced natural sites. As we walk to the site entrance from the Meadowhall car park, he tells me how the site — once home to Edgar Allen and Co’s vast Imperial Steel Works until its closure in 1989 — was originally set to become a separate leisure part of Meadowhall. However, these plans never got off the drawing board, and the land was instead used as an overflow car park at Christmas and during the January sales.
In 2021, an urban explorer visited the site and found a few factory buildings still dotted around the area. There’s nothing like that there now, but Gerry Firkins does spot some things of interest immediately. First, he identifies the spindly stems and round yellow flowers of narrow-leaved ragwort (senecio inaequidens) and some cocksfoot grass (dactylis glomerata), which is only tiny at the moment but will one day grow into a sizable clump. Canadian fleabane (erigeron canadensis) is also here, as is yellow-wort (blackstonia perfoliata), which is normally found on limestone dales but grows here because of the lime in the mortar which was contained in the demolished factory buildings.
“I love coming to places like this,” he says. “You never know what you are going to find.” Some of the species, like the narrow-leaved ragwort, are quite a common sight, he explains. Others, like the yellow-wort, are a bit more unusual. He points out some bristly oxtongue (helminthotheca echioides), a common rubble-site plant, as well as the distinctive fronds of several clumps of pampas grass (cortaderia selloana), the seeds of which likely “blew in” on the wind from someone’s garden.
Judging by the age of the birches surrounding the site, Firkins estimates it has been left like this for around eight to ten years. We’ve probably come a bit too late in the year to see the site in its full glory. Nigel Dunnett’s photos show it covered in thousands of North American asters (aster alpinus) and Firkins also thinks there would probably be lots of bee orchids — and bees — in the summer.
One part of the site is noticeably wetter than the others. Firkins shows me some water reeds (phragmites australis) that seem to have found an unlikely home here. Further along, we walk into a field of wild carrots. Having blossomed in the summer, the carrots are now slowly dying, giving their tall stems and umbels a brittle, skeletal quality. Firkins says he finds these the most puzzling of all, and suspects their presence may be due to some “guerilla gardening” — that they may have been deliberately sowed. However they got here, they look magnificent.
Not all of the site looks quite this good though. On our tour, we also see some evidence of fly-tipping, and Firkins says the last time he came here a man was living in a tent. Some of the ground is likely to be toxic as well, he adds, pointing out several dead or dying trees on the margins. Ground contamination would mean the site needs to be remediated before any development takes place, which might be one reason that it has been left to its own devices.
The Meadowhall site has caught the attention of botanists from further afield. Harry Watkins, from the St Andrews Botanic Garden in Fife, had a study of the site commissioned for a project investigating how plants are evolving in response to climate change, focusing on landscapes that are particularly influenced by human activity. A “completely novel ecosystem” has been established at the Meadowhall site, he says, creating a plant community that wouldn’t have existed without the influence of humans. “What we’re seeing is evolution happening in front of us,” he adds.
Research tends to concentrate on oak woodland or river banks, so there has long been a blind spot about these types of landscapes, Watkins continues. The benefit of the St Andrews project is that they will be going back to the site year after year to see how the plants are changing over time, providing vital evidence of how these novel ecosystems are adapting. “There are sites like this all over the world now,” says Watkins. “What we’re trying to do is link them up to see if there are similar processes happening and whether we can find shared solutions.”
Everyone I speak to is well aware that, as an empty brownfield site, the area could be developed soon. What should happen to it between now and whenever someone finds an economic use for it? Left alone, it will “scrub up”, Firkins says, meaning it will eventually be completely covered by low trees and bushes. Dunnett tells me he doesn't want to just leave it and that the best solution would be to manage it as a so-called “mosaic habitat”, an area where many different environments are found close together and biodiversity flourishes. There is a lot of evidence showing that open grassland is better for biodiversity than denser scrub. To keep it in this ideal state will take some intervention, just not that much.
“All you would need is a few boards or paths and you’d have a natural park at a very low cost,” he says. “It’s so close to somewhere that millions of people shop every year. It would be a wasted opportunity if we didn’t use it.” He tells me all the planted areas around Meadowhall are very conventional and a huge amount of time and money is spent cutting and weeding them. “Ultimately, all these interventions stop it from being what it wants to be, which is an urban prairie,” he adds. “Why can’t you put the buildings in the middle of this stuff instead?”
Dunnett claims that even the terms that planners and developers use for this kind of land are loaded and concentrate on economic over environmental value. “Brownfield makes it sound like it's all dead, while derelict makes it sound like it's got nothing on it,” he says. Current policy is to build on these sites preferentially as they are seen as having no value, but in many cases, these sites are undervalued and actually support more biodiversity than some greenfield sites, he adds. As well as hordes of insects in the summer, there are rabbits like the one I saw, and lots of foxes. “I’ve seen butterflies and dragonflies here,” he adds. “Someone saw a barn owl here once.”
A botanical traditionalist, Gerry Firkins isn’t quite as struck on the site as Nigel Dunnett. For one, he thinks it has too many invasive species in it. If it was to remain, he’d prefer to take out some plants and add others to better enable it to support as much biodiversity as possible. But he thinks it would be equally valid to let the site develop in the way it wants to until a long-term use is found. “We have always had rubble and car park sites, particularly after the war,” he says. “There is always something being left abandoned.” For him, the site shouldn’t be preserved as it is, but used to teach how sites like this slowly morph from industrial uses to scrubland and ultimately, if left long enough, established woodland. “That is fascinating in itself,” he adds.
I’m reminded of the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi; an appreciation of beauty in nature that is imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. “It’s a fascinating site, but it’s also ephemeral,” Firkins says. A similar site nearby is currently being built on by the Ministry of Defence and Forgemasters; one day, this will probably be built on as well. He thinks the best thing to do with this is to let it do its thing and enjoy it while it’s here.
Whatever happens to it, it’s there now: a valuable breathing space in a part of the city you wouldn't expect to find one. I find it quite moving, walking around what was once a hive of heavy industry that’s either returning to nature or turning into future nature. There’s a bittersweet contrast between the quiet of the present and the roar of the industrial past. Firkins had a similar feeling when he visited a former coal tip near Rawmarsh. Over the last 30 years, it’s been colonised by a sea of purple orchids. The factories and slag heaps have now long gone, but something good remains.
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