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RUMMAGING IN ROTHERHAM
(I went there so you don’t have to!)
THI’S NOOAR PLE’ASS LIKE OOAM
When I was a youngster, older relatives on my father’s side would tell me that our family went back at least six generations in Sheffield. In other words they were proud of having gone nowhere. That is a simplification of course, indeed as I found out many years later, some family members even settled across the Atlantic, and let’s not forget there were two big wars and some smaller ones too. It is also perhaps an understatement though, since I can well believe that some of my ancient ancestors dragged themselves out of the very primordial swamp that would later become the River Sheaf and give Sheffield its name.
Certainly, none of my family travelled very far when I was a child, at a time when Yorkshire folk did not like to stray outside Yorkshire, and insisted on having their holidays en masse in Bridlington (positioned in the place of the nostril on the ‘man’s face’ of England’s East Coast), where they could even buy copies of the local Sheffield papers during the ‘works weeks’ (two weeks at the beginning of August when the blast furnaces were allowed to cool and the whole of Sheffield’s steel industry shut down, they are perhaps more correctly called ‘wakes weeks’
. I remember marvelling at just how many people my father knew as we walked down the sea-front at Brid. “Nah then Tooany, tha awreight, ‘avin a good ‘un?” [Translation: “Greetings Anthony. How are you? Well I hope. Are you having a pleasant day?”]
“Ay up ‘Arry, jus’ tekkin young ‘un fer sum spice.” [“Good morning Harold. I’m just taking my young son to the sweet (candy) shop.”]
I didn’t realise all these blokes were just my dad’s workmates, all having their holidays in the same town at the same time!
Years later, after becoming the first member of my family to possess a passport, when my parents told me they were off to Brid again, I asked them why they didn’t try going abroad. In the end, and with some reluctance, they went overseas to the Isle-Of-Wight, just off the South coast of England!
UNCLE FRANK FROM ROTHERHAM
Many of my father’s extended family lived within a few streets of one another, and as a child he lived only a few doors from the house in which his mother had grown up, and where her mother still lived. My grandfather’s younger brother however was always known as “Uncle Frank from Rotherham”.
In geographical terms, Rotherham (pronounced ‘Rothrem’
is a carbuncle on the side of Sheffield. No countryside separates the two, and Rotherham was then reached only by passing directly through the Dante’s Inferno of Sheffield’s East End, with its vast steel works and rolling mills, spewing ash and flame into the sky, and covering both towns in a thick layer of black soot. The final gateway to Rotherham was the enormous juddering multi-tier Tinsley Viaduct, which carried the M1 motorway north to Leeds, and routed other traffic elsewhere. So far as I know, no other place on the M1, offers so many lanes leading AWAY.Despite his moniker though, ‘Uncle Frank from Rotherham’ never actually lived beyond that ugly steel structure with its twelve lanes of noisy traffic. He lived ON THE WAY to Rotherham, nearer to it than the rest of my father’s extended clan, but not actually in Rotherham itself. It was a sign of my family’s outward mobility that the only immediate family member who did not live within a few streets of everyone else, hadn’t even managed to get as far as the next town. Six generations, and we’d only made it about 2 miles!
That said, moving to Rotherham could not be viewed as evolutionary progress by anyone who has ever been there. About ten years ago, I was unfortunate enough to have to live in Rotherham for two months, and I regard it as a rotten, ugly place, with few, if any, redeeming features – and I think I’m being overly generous there.
THE UGLY SISTERS
The steel works that made up Sheffield’s East End are now gone, and visitors who pass along the road they formerly lined today, are generally going to the Meadowhall shopping complex (known locally as MeadowHELL), or they are simply lost. It is unlikely, unless they have no sense whatsoever, that they are going to Rotherham. “Move along, there’s nothing to see here”, as British policemen are fond of saying - not in relation to Rotherham I might add, but they would if they knew the place.
The Tinsley Viaduct is still there, as dark and dirty as ever, and until a few years ago, squatting adjacent to it, (just before the Blackburn Meadows Sewage Works) were two massive cooling-towers, which were the gateway to Rotherham in much the same way as the famous Colossus formed the entrance to ancient Rhodes. The difference of course is that the Colossus was one of the wonders of the ancient world, while the cooling-towers were just cooling-towers, and redundant ones at that, sitting there like two humungous stale pork-pies. Their apparent lack of any artistic or architectural merit however was a moot point in Rotherham, where they have little to judge these things by, and it should tell you everything about this singularly ugly town that their eventual demolition was postponed for more than a decade because they were considered to “be part of the unique cultural heritage of Rotherham”!
When the giant towers were eventually dynamited, in the dead of night (well it was ‘dead’ before the explosion), large crowds gathered to watch and mourn the destruction of a revered local landmark. Paintings were painted, poems written, Youtube is full of short films of the demise of these ugly sisters, which have left Rotherham bereft of a suitable landmark to mark its Western border, other than the viaduct and the sewage works.
At the height of the British coal-mining and steel industries, Rotherham may have been dirtier, and smellier, and ugly, but it still manages to be all of these with little significant local industry apart from heroin-dealing, and it is still the rough, tough town it always has been. Indeed Rotherham, is a violent place, vastly more so than it’s much larger neighbour, Sheffield. The pubs there have always been notorious for their brawls, in fact so has the whole town. Some years ago, I was with a friend, when he struck up a conversation with a Rotherham lad. They got to talking about the pubs of Rotherham, and my friend said that he had sometimes been in a town-centre pub called ‘The County’. “Oh, tha’ll know me mother then”, replied the Rotherham bloke in a thick South Yorkshire accent. “Big woman, alluz stands at bar, tattoos on face, spits a lot”. I’m not sure, in Rotherham, that description would narrow it down much.
Anyone with any sense does not own up to living in Rotherham. There used to be a local punk band in the eighties, who played under the name of ‘Phil Murray & The Boys From Bury’. They sang a few songs about this dreary Lancashire town, and were generally good fun and well-liked. They were however, actually from Rotherham, and they had the good sense to keep that to themselves.
T’MARKET
Perhaps the only reason any outsiders ever had to go to Rotherham in the past, unless they just wanted to get drunk and have a punch-up or seek out facially tattooed, expectorating lovelies , was its market, which decades ago had a reputation for being very cheap, particularly for shoes. In fact, when I was at school there was a certain shoe that was briefly fashionable, called imaginatively, a “Rotherham market shoe”. The fact that it was made almost entirely of compressed cardboard may have accounted for its low cost. Possibly it was some attempt to reduce the numbers of drunks kicked to death by other drunks.
Rotherham made its cinematic debut in the low-budget and unremittingly awful British soccer hooligan film ‘I.D.’ , where a fight between rival gangs of football thugs takes place in the market. I bet the actors who took part in that scene were out of Rotherham faster than a rat down a drainpipe, and certainly long gone before darkness fell.
Despite my aversion to ever setting foot in Rotherham again myself, and in spite of the admonitions of a friend to stay well away from the place, and “Don’t bother ‘em in Rotherham”, I felt that in my quest for pointy bargains, I needed to brave the Tinsley Viaduct/Sewage Works passage and see if Rotherham market had anything to offer.
Rotherham is geographically quite close to Leeds, Yorkshire’s largest town, yet it is faster and less expensive to get from Leeds to London (by train, bus, or coach), than it is to get to Rotherham. I found information about getting there surprisingly difficult to get hold of, and near unintelligible when I did get it. It as if some hidden cabal of Health & Safety planners have deliberately put up barriers to prevent the ingress of any outsiders foolish enough to even contemplate undertaking this arduous journey, through fear of what might happen to them should they reach the very centre of South Yorkshire darkness. Since all routes seem to go via Sheffield anyway, I decided to meet up with a local guide, and venture in from Steel City on foot.
THE HEART OF DARKNESS
I set off up river from Sheffield, with my faithful guide Scooby and his dog Levi, who had promised to show me the flea-market of old Rotherham town (Scooby that is, not the dog). As we followed the River Don’s meandering route past the blackened hulks which once turned out Sheffield’s finest steel, I was gripped with a grim foreboding of what might await us beyond the ugly iron bridge and the swamp of Blackburn Meadows. In the distance we could already hear the cries of the lost souls of Meadowhell.
Further and further our journey took us, past river-dumped shopping trolleys, and flood-deposited flotsam and jetsam. Levi, Scooby’s faithful mutt, stopped and sniffed the air. Was he apprehensive about continuing, or did he smell a rat? If it was a rat, and there are plenty along the banks of the Don, it was a great, big, fat, dead one. But no, the stench was Blackburn Meadows Sewage Works, which I was once forced to visit on a school trip by a sadistic geography teacher. It was like being back in the blackboard jungle all over again.
As I contemplated being back in that jungle, the distant judder of wind-farm propellers, instantly transported me to other times and places. On the horizon the sky was stained by the foul smoke of an incinerator or chemical works. Purple haze it wasn’t, more like dirty orange smog.
Along the river we occasioned across a variety of characters. All were headed in the opposite direction, it was an ominous portent. Two junkies shambled towards us, high on cheap smack, and talking maniacally. This truly was the fag-end of the world!
Throughout the journey, I pondered deeply on what we would find at its end. If truth be told, Scooby is as daft as a brush (as we say in these parts), his brain addled by too much cut-price ale and gone to mush on lardy fry-ups. I knew that when we reached the Heart of Darkness, if things didn’t go according to plan, I was on my own.
We eventually reached the vast hulk of Tinsley Viaduct, its multiple exits spilling out in all directions like some hideously deformed beast. In a hushed tone Scooby asked if we were going beyond the bridge. It seemed a daft question, how else were we going to reach our destination? We’d both signed up for this mission, getting there was but the first step. Scooby seemed distracted as he tucked into a meat paste sandwich, his faithful (but equally daft) hound by his side. My hand brushed against the steel structure, feeling the throb of a dozen racing juggernauts overhead. “Come on tha piklet”, I said, “We’ll never get theer at this rate!” [Translation: “Come on, you funny fellow, at the current rate of perambulation we shall never reach our destination.”]
There was just one more bridge to pass before we reached our destination, the Bridge Inn, then it was over the canal and into Rotherham itself. As I looked at the strange streets in front of me, I remarked: “We’re not in Kansas anymore.”
“Kansas?” Scooby responded in a rare moment of clarity. “What the bleedin’ heck would tha know abaht Kansas? Tha wants to gi thi ‘ead a shek!” [“I am inclined to think your geographical knowledge may be somewhat lacking old chap. Perhaps you have spent too long in the midday sun and need a rest and a Pimms.”]
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I was just looking online to see where Rotherham is twinned with, and apparently it's a place in France called St Quentin. San Quentin might be more appropriate!
