Ghosts and treasures
I went back to Wincobank today, a neighbourhood in the north-east of Sheffield where there is a cluster of sculptures I wanted to record. They are relics of various community initiatives, and form a small local sculpture trail. Parts of one of them are in the extras: a pillar with a wonderful extract of a poem by a local schoolboy, about war, and another commemorating a founder member of the Sheffield Female Anti-Slavery Society, one Mary Anne Rawson. But the main, today, had to be this pub sign, which I've seen gradually fade over the years. Of course I now wish I'd bothered to stop and take its picture before it faded quite so much.
Wincobank is up on a ridge overlooking the Don Valley - formerly the centre of Sheffield's steel industry. The ridge is also the site of the remains of a hill fort, dated to around 500 BC. Historically Wincobank has been an area with a lot of inter-war and postwar council housing, interspersed with dense 19th century terraced streets. It's never been an affluent area, and now it's looking pretty battered in parts. This pub - formerly The Foundry Arms, latterly some kind of beauty parlour and now deserted - captures the waves that have swept Wincobank.
There's a bit of background about the Wincobank hill fort here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wincobank_(hill_fort)
And there's a local history page here, with a somewhat older picture, in which you can see more of the detail on the pub sign:
https://www.sheffieldhistory.co.uk/forums/topic/5994-foundry-arms-tyler-street-wincobank/
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