On your right is Castlegate... and few places in Sheffield show the city’s layers quite so bluntly. Thomas de Furnival got a charter from King Henry the Third in twelve seventy to build a castle here. Parliament ordered that castle slighted in sixteen forty-nine, meaning they deliberately smashed its defenses so nobody could use it for war again. Fairly final, you’d think. Sheffield disagreed.
By the twelve nineties, cutlers were already working nearby along the Don. The earliest named one we know is Robertus le Coteler in twelve ninety-seven, which is a lovely way of saying Sheffield had a knife-and-blade reputation before most places had worked out the branding.
Then this ground changed jobs again. Norfolk Market Hall opened here in eighteen fifty-one and traded until nineteen fifty-nine. Castle Market replaced it, built between nineteen sixty and nineteen sixty-five, and demolition began in twenty fifteen. Markets, castles, rubble, reinvention... that is Castlegate’s favorite habit.
But the real jolt came in August twenty eighteen, when Wessex Archaeology and University of Sheffield students dug into the cleared site. They found a nineteenth-century crucible-steel furnace cellar: rows of brick bays and the ash pits beneath the furnace, marked on an eighteen fifties map. Wessex described the cellar as a hot, unpleasant place, with furnaces above reaching around twelve hundred degrees centigrade. Ash dropped into those pits, where a worker, perhaps a young boy, hauled it out in back-breaking labor.
This matters because Huntsman’s crucible steel made Sheffield famous. In seventeen forty-two, Benjamin Huntsman, a clockmaker in Handsworth, melted about thirty-four pounds of blister steel in small clay pots, added flux, covered them, and heated them on coke fires for about three hours. The result was cleaner, more uniform steel... ideal for the best blades.
Look toward Waingate for the old Town Hall, Charles Watson’s courthouse from eighteen oh-seven to eighteen oh-eight, where local criminal courts sat until nineteen ninety-five. Across the street, Castle House from nineteen sixty-four stands for the Co-op movement, after its earlier grand store was destroyed in the Sheffield Blitz.
Now walk through toward Paradise Square - Sheffield’s great open-air dissenting and Chartist meeting ground is waiting, where John Wesley preached to the largest weekday congregation he had ever seen.
