Sheffield Audio Tour: Crucible and Hull

Sheffield's cutlery and steel walked the world, and behind every Old Sheffield Plate teapot and stainless dinner knife stood a courtyard yard, a wet grindstone, a smoke-stained chapel and a thousand independent craftsmen the city called Little Mesters. This self-guided audio tour traces a Sheffield working day through the centre of the city, from a town hall whose facade carries the carved trades and whose Roman god of the forge still tops the spire, through the cutlers' company chartered in 1624, the radical newspaper editor jailed in 1795 for what he printed, the cobbled square where John Wesley met his largest weekday congregation and the Chartists were dispersed by troops, past the open ground where crucible-steel furnaces still lie beneath the dirt, to the Cultural Industries Quarter where eighteen separate little-mester trades worked one yard, and finally to Leah's Yard itself, the only city-centre courtyard restored as a living monument to the people who actually made Sheffield's name. Walk slowly. The buildings still hold their shape, and the trades still hold their names.