Sheffield
Sheffield is England’s fourth largest conurbation, with a population of around 500,000. The city made its name during the industrial revolution in steel manufacturing, and was a thriving industrial centre until the post war period. But as with other heavily industrialised cities, it suffered considerably during the 1970s recession following the oil crisis of 1973, with major job losses, increasing unemployment and social deprivation. This was compounded by the privatisation of both the coal and steel industries in the 1980s under Thatcher’s conservative government, which left the city with high unemployment and a shrinking manufacturing workforce. |
The case study area of Southey and Owlerton lies in the north of the city, a predominantly residential area of inter-war garden-city style social housing estates, characterised in the 1990s by high indices of multiple deprivation following the significant manufacturing job losses. In 1999, the local regeneration board was awarded over £20 million of Single Regeneration Budget (SRB) funding, from the national regeneration programme, to invest in the economic and social regeneration of the area. Following an initial plan that would have seen widespread demolition in three of the six local neighbourhoods, this was rejected in favour of an alternative vision for the regeneration of the area, with neighbourhood strategies based on extensive local consultation. A community-led partnership helped to identify priorities in discussion with local communities, to highlight the opportunities and challenges of each neighbourhood.