Sheffield Audio Tours

Sheffield's knife trade was old enough that Chaucer mentioned a Sheffield thwitel in the Canterbury Tales in the 14th century. Stainless steel was invented here by Harry Brearley in 1912. Sheffield F.C., founded in 1857, is the world's oldest football club, and Sandygate, where they play, is the world's oldest football ground still in use. The city sits on seven hills in the Pennine foothills, with one third of its entire area inside the Peak District National Park. Sixty-one percent of Sheffield is green space, and it has more than four and a half million trees, which makes it statistically one of the greenest cities in Europe.

George Orwell called Sheffield in 1937 'the ugliest town in the Old World,' a verdict he arrived at during the peak of its industrial operation when coal dust and back-to-back housing were all he could see.

The steel industry collapsed in the 1970s and 1980s and took a great deal with it. Blake Street has England's third-steepest residential gradient, running down at 16.6 degrees. The city is physically uneven and temperamentally similar: the December 1940 Blitz killed over 660 people and the Marples Hotel took a direct hit, yet the city rebuilt itself without losing the directness for which it has always been known.