Thousands of Sheffield stories have never been told — Désirée Reynolds set out to uncover them

In 1901, the pioneering filmmakers Sagar Mitchell and James Kenyon came to Sheffield to film ironworks employees leaving their shift at Brown’s Atlas Works. It was part of their series of factory gates films that had seen them do the same everywhere from Lyon to Blackburn via Hull. Streams of men can be seen leaving the gates, with many huffing on pipes as their eyes cannot help but be drawn to the strange contraption that is pointing at them.

After a couple of minutes, it cuts to a shot of children in front of the same gates, as they wave rapidly, exposing big toothy grins. All except one child. A small Black girl in the corner of the shot looks bemused, almost panicked, as she clasps her hands together and looks over her shoulder with eyes darting around fearfully. 

“She typifies the story of the archive,” says the Sheffield-based writer Désirée Reynolds, as we meet for coffee in South St Kitchen. “Because: who is she? Where is she from? Where are her parents? If you watch that footage and you're not emotionally moved by it…I don't know who you are.” 

It’s been over three years since Reynolds came across that footage when working as Writer in Residence for Sheffield City Archives and set out to find out who that little girl was. It’s a long and twisting journey that has now culminated in a brand new city-wide exhibition rooted in exploring the untold histories of people of colour in the region. The Dig Where You Stand (DWYS) Biennial is currently running until August 18th.  

Reynolds moved to Sheffield in 1996 in her early twenties but was born in London and grew up in Clapham with her parents originally from Jamaica. It’s become something of a full circle moment for Reynolds to end up in a years-long project digging into archives and spending countless hours in libraries because that was a big part of her childhood too. “I always had a bit of a nerdy streak about history,” she explains. “During difficult times at home — as my parents divorced in quite a tragic way — I'd go and sit in the library to do my coursework because I realised I had to get out. I really do believe that that library saved my life in more ways than one.” 

From a young age Reynolds was exposed to interesting and alternative history. She recalls her dad being something of a “pub scholar” and telling her about characters such as John Archer, who was the first Black mayor of Battersea — or of any London Borough — back in 1913. But this was a version of history she struggled to find elsewhere. “Even though we had a community that was mostly Black and Brown-led, it still felt like you're not on TV, you're not represented in the books you're reading, you're not represented in the courses you're learning in school,” she says. “I always had a sense that when we were doing history that it wasn't the full story. There was always a gap. And there's a fascination about that gap that I haven't really let go of. It's still about how that gap needs to be filled. That's what has motivated me.”

At around 15 years old, Reynolds came across the story of Sarah Baartman, a Khoikhoi woman who was exhibited as a freak show attraction — due to her steatopygic body type — in 19th-century Europe under the name Hottentot Venus. “I don't know how I came across her story,” she reflects. “But I was transfixed by her. I grew up a lonely fat girl and, somehow, I connected with her physicality and how she was on display. I think being a woman, and being a Black woman, you are always on display. But you are on display and invisible at the same time.” 

Reynolds went to the British Library by herself to investigate further, discovering personal letters Baartman had written and finding out that Baartman’s body parts — including her skull and genitalia — had remained on display in a museum in France for over 150 years after her death in 1815. “I have no idea what possessed me to go and do it,” she says. “But then I became quite enamoured of the process of going through things that somebody else might not have thought was important.”  

As Reynolds became an adult, she realised she needed to leave the capital. “What I was in London was a daughter,” she says. She remembers being a classic over-pleaser middle child, and at a certain point realised that if she didn’t get out, she wouldn’t be anything else. “The only thing I knew that I wanted to do was be a writer. It was my way of travelling, escaping, being somebody else and doing amazing things.” 

University offers from Sheffield and Cardiff arrived. Reynolds picked Sheffield on a whim because the weather was nicer on the day she visited. When she arrived properly to study English, and then Cultural Studies, she landed with something of a bump. “It was a really huge culture shock,” she recalls. “There was racism that I hadn't really encountered before. In my community in Clapham, growing up, it was very Black and Brown. The only people that were white were police and teachers. So I had no concept of what I was doing when I made that choice [to come to Sheffield]. It was very segregated and I found the casual racism shocking.”

The sense of isolation was perhaps further exacerbated by Reynolds not knowing anybody in the city. “My mum knew of a cousin of someone that she knew, so I lived with her for six to eight months,” she says. “She was a Jamaican Buddhist, which was a little bit unusual. But I wasn't getting what I wanted [from being in the city] because it was like, isn't she just telling my mum everything?”

But soon enough Reynolds found her people within the thriving underground music scene, particularly via Sheffield Community Radio, which was a pirate station where you could hear Reynolds pumping out hip-hop, R&B and jungle. “The radio really was my thing,” she recalls. “I loved it. I loved the pressure of it. I did end up going on legal radio for a minute, but it wasn't the same. You wouldn't get people phoning you up and saying, ‘play it back!’. Also, the anonymity of it all. I loved that it's just this disembodied voice.” 

Years later, when Reynolds met the Sheffield writer and photographer Johny Pitts, who is a project advisor for DWYS, he immediately recognised Reynolds’ voice. It turns out his sister had recorded numerous tapes of Reynolds’ show and would play them consistently in the family home.

Lugging records up the stairs to “stinky and skanky” flats (depending on where the current iteration of the illegal radio station was held) began to lose its appeal when Reynolds became pregnant and for years after her family became her focus. But she remained an avid writer — something she’d done since being a child — and by 2013 had published her debut novel, Seduce, and a series of short stories published in various anthologies followed that.

One of these stories, ‘Born on Sunday Silent’, in many ways laid the groundwork for what would become Dig Where You Stand — a project described as an “archival justice movement” that uses creative practices to reimagine the city’s overlooked records of people of colour. Reynolds was asked in 2019 to contribute a short story to The Book of Sheffield: A City in Short Fiction and decided to go back to an old hangout for inspiration. “At University I was a terrible student because I was too busy partying,” she laughs. “And I did a lot of what I shouldn't be doing in Sheffield General Cemetery.” She went back there and spoke to the team at the cemetery and asked for a Black story. 

This led her to Kai Akosua Mansah, a Ghanaian baby who was born, and died, in 1902 and is buried in the cemetery in a communal, unmarked grave. Reynolds’ subsequent story tells the story of a child spirit, based on Mansah, that interlinks with Reynolds’ own journey as the spirit wanders through Sheffield's libraries and archives uncovering their own past. It was then adapted into a short film last year.

Around this time Reynolds was conducting some research for a project and had gone into the local studies library to ask for information on locally enslaved people. “All they had was hoes,” she says. “Just pictures of the farming equipment that got sent out to the plantations. I was like, no. I knew that there were versions of us in this archive and I'm going to find it.” 

A year later she found herself on a Zoom call with Peter Evans, the Archives and Heritage Manager at Sheffield City Council. “I said to him there's got to be more than this,” she recalls. “And what you need is a writer or artist in residence. And he was like, alright then. So, I didn't pitch it or anything. It was just a reaction to the frustration.”

Sheffield University funded the residency for six months. “Going into the archives, I was thinking that I was going to swan in and find these incredible things,” Reynolds says. “That they're just going to be sitting there waiting for me with my name on. And of course, no. It took real work.” Still, she has to stress how brilliant the archive team has been — in her experience, few archives are so open to change.

When Reynolds discovered the footage of the girl at the factory gates when undertaking this work, it resonated with her deeply — perhaps echoing some of the same feelings she felt as a young teen learning about Sarah Baartman. “I think that little girl appeals to me and drives me because she typifies all the little Black girls that have found themselves ‘the only one’ in any space,” she says. “It's her obvious loneliness and isolation. And I also think that what's lacking in a lot of academic research is: where's the heart? To ask: what happened to her? What happened to her family? How did she get there? Where did she go after that? What were her ambitions? How did she feel?” 

One lead led her back to Birchinlee, also known as Tin Town, which was a temporary village set up for workers in the early 1900s as they constructed the Derwent and Howden dams. This village, with a population of around 900, was filled with transient workers and had its own school, hospital, pub, police station, and post office. When Reynolds came across photos taken from it, she found a photograph of a young Black girl. “I was like, could she be the girl at the factory gates?” she recalls excitedly. “It's like being a detective in a way. I don't think it is her but I will always strive to find her.”  

And so extracting a human story via creative response was central to DWYS’ first exhibition that took place back in 2021. In collaboration with the creative studio Peter and Paul, it turned Reynolds’ archive findings into striking public artworks. One piece highlighted the negative fake news spread about the appearance of Malcolm X in the city by the Sheffield Telegraph back in 1964; another saw the city’s first ever poet laureate, Otis Mensah, take inspiration for a poem from Samuel Morgan Smith, the Black tragedian born in Philadelphia who came to the UK and became known for his Shakespearean roles, such as Othello, and who spent his final impoverished years in Sheffield. 

The piece ‘The 33,575+’ was a sobering artistic depiction of the number of people trafficked by the Sheffield-born Thomas Staniforth, who is listed as having taken at least 79 voyages in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade database. Along with that resulting artwork, which powerfully displayed every one of those people visually via a graphic dot, Reynolds also came across Staniforth’s diary in the archives. 

It fails to even mention any of his activities in the slave trade, instead noting day-to-day mundanities such as having a drink, the weather, his investments and the like. Such absences and silences are what Reynolds describes as encountering “the violence of the archive.”

During the first iteration of DWYS, which involved finding a lot of stories about children, it ended up being a huge personal undertaking for Reynolds to dig into these stories, many of which she describes as “horrible” and “hard work”. Such as uncovering the story of Shirley Campbell, a “three-year old tap-dancing piccaninny” who was abandoned on the streets of Liverpool and ended up in the Grenoside Institution in Sheffield. A newspaper article Reynolds found reported that the child, described as “it” had been refused help by a shelter.

Or sometimes such discoveries can also further serve to amplify just how many voices, stories and people have been lost, or never documented, over the years. Such as the story of Thomas Pompey, a 14 year-old from Guinea who ended up in Rotherham in 1725 and whom Reynolds found via a baptism record. “He's the godson of a Marquess,” she explains. “So that's the only reason why we found him. Simply because he was the godson of somebody rich and famous.”  

Reynolds worked closely with Cheryl Bailey, who is employed at the city’s archive, who then became the official Senior Archivist of DWYS. After the first exhibition, Alex Mason from The Centre for Equity & Inclusion got in touch to see if he could help and came on board as Project Manager. He was instrumental in getting DWYS awarded £112,100 by the National Lottery Heritage, with the aim of opening up the archive to more people to explore and create work in response to. “It can't just be me,” Reynolds says. “I cannot be the only artist reflecting on this. It has to be other people. I believe in collective action, so we can't do this stuff on our own. If we don't in some way organise and find points of convergence, then how does anything change?”

The funding has led to 14 local artists of colour being commissioned for the Biennial, which is run in partnership with Sheffield City Archives, The Centre for Equity & Inclusion and Peter & Paul. “The Biennial is more than an arts exhibition, it is a reclamation,” says Reynolds. “An act of memory recovery and re-narration of the region’s hidden racial history.” The 14 featured artists are: Patty Bugembe, Seiko Kinoshita, Eelyn Lee, Kedisha Coakley, Najma Heybe, Jacqui Hilson, Ellis Walker, Rosamaria Cisneros, Dal Kular, Cole Morris, CJ Simon, Asma Kabadeh, Otis Mensah, and Wemmy Ogunyankin.

The exhibition, along with a series of one-off events, are presented for free across several venues: Yorkshire Artspace, Sheffield Cathedral, Moor Market, Sheffield Central Library and the Winter Gardens. Making the work accessible to as many people as possible was imperative for Reynolds. “If you deliver things in the same place, you get the same audience,” she says. “And we're trying to reach a different demographic.” 

Sitting in the middle of a heaving Moor Market for lunch at the weekend, as people slurp noodles, scoff chips, and sip tea, it certainly has a different feel to your typical exhibition. Scattered across the market floor are a series of full size doors that have been taken from the yet-to-be-refurbished part of Park Hill — picked for symbolic reasons that reflect the archive, in that doors can be both entryways and new beginnings as well as barriers — and contain information of each of the 14 artists work along with a QR code to engage with those that have audio or video properties.  

All of these finished 14 works are located at Persistence Works on Brown Street, which is home to Yorkshire Artspace. It’s a genuinely eclectic collection of work. There’s poetry from the likes of Otis Mensah and CJ Simon. Mensah’s is an epic narrative poem rooted in a tale about how in 1820 a Sheffield-born quaker purchased the freedom of two African men, Sandanee and Mahmadee — complete with an immersive jazz-inflected soundscape. In contrast, Simon’s poetic imagining of the life of Edgar Jessop Smith (the son of the aforementioned Samuel Morgan Smith) is presented in a huge scroll-like physical form.  

Wemmy Ogunyankin’s work is in response to a local article from 1909 lamenting the fact that colonial Britain couldn't get the people of Ibadan in Nigeria to drink enough beer, unlike more “drunken towns” like Barnsley. The response is a striking and humorous photograph taken of a woman today who is fiercely turning away from a bottle of Barnsley ale being thrust in her face.

There’s also textile and tapestry work that connects Sheffield and Nigerian heritage; there’s a poem and dance-based film by Rosamaria Cisneros that explores the story of the story of the so-called “Gypsy Queen” buried in Sheffield in the 1940s. This same films acts as a deeper reflection of the Roma community in Sheffield, which has been found to go back 500 years in the records. 

It’s not a vast collection of work but it’s a varied and engaging assembly of words, images, sounds, textiles and video that brings the discoveries of the archive to life in a way that goes beyond just presenting cold facts and figures. Perhaps the most animated of all of the works is Hunter 77, which tells the story of Joe Phillips.

A seemingly eccentric figure and amateur filmmaker who attempted to remake a western — supposedly with real horses and live ammunition — in the Peak District before the police shut him down. The steel worker was originally from Jamaica and also decided to build his own boat from scrap bits of metal and to sail back home. Based on audio recordings unearthed from the archive, Cole Morris depicts this unique story in a shadow puppet film with beautiful detail and remarkable execution. Morris, along with Jacqui Hilson (textiles) and Dal Kular (poetry and book binding), will feature as part of an open studios day on July 27 to show and explain their work and processes in greater detail. 

There are also several one-off events as part of the exhibition, such as Ancestral Futures on August 17th. This is a processional street performance created in honour of the first recorded Chinese people in Sheffield — who it turns out were a group of magicians on tour from China who performed at the Whitsuntide Festival in 1855. “This really impacts on how we think about the demographics of Sheffield,” says Reynolds. “The Chinese community didn't just rock up because of being university students and staying around — they've always been here.”

The ultimate aim for Reynolds with all of this is “re-narrating Sheffield”. She explains: “One of the purposes of DWYS is that we are curating Black and Brown legacy but we're also creating it.”

The aim is also rooted in the idea that it’s not just about extracting from the archive but by applying that information to artistic pursuits, the archive itself can be enhanced, altered and shaped for future generations. “Everything that we do is going to go back into the archives,” she says. “An archive is supposed to be a city's collective memory, so why aren't we in there? It’s about asking: how did that happen and how can we reinstall ourselves? We want people to feel seen.”

For more information about the Dig Where You Stand Biennial 2024, click here.