Sharp Practice

In a word-association game, most people, if offered the word 'Sheffield' would come up with 'steel'. For many of us, this goes right back to our childhood, reading the words paired on the knives of the best family cutlery, brought out for visitors and festivals. Sheffield's development and commercial exploitation of both advanced steel-making processes and improved silver-plating techniques took place in the 1740s. This, aligned with the ready availability of nearby coal, put it at the forefront of the industrial revolution, producing both industrial steel and fine cutlery

But this pre-eminence did not come out of nowhere. Sheffield was already well-known for knife production in the 14th century and, by the end of the 17th century was second only to London. The infrastructure, the expertise and the social and commercial networks were already in place before the technological leap that made Sheffield a steel capital

Towards the end of the 16th century, a will was written, leaving a grinding workshop, situated on the Porter Brook - a tributary of the river Don, with its confluence beneath the Sheffield city railway station - from father to son. The Porter is rather larger than a typical brook - actually a sizeable and quite powerful and complex river system, with a significant fall of 300m between its source just outside the city and its terminus in the centre. This energetic water has been exploited for hundreds of years, to drive the water-wheels of corn-mills, of course but, in Sheffield, to drive also the spinning stone wheels of grinding workshops

These early industrial workshops were hell-holes of damp, poor ventilation, stone dust, fine particles of metal and danger, in which a dozen or so men and boys would spend their days amid endlessly spinning stones, grinding the city's blades to sharpness, before returning them to a cutler for finishing. Many of the men who spent their lives on this work died an early death of silicosis, caused by the effect of stone dust on the lungs

A restored workshop, now a museum, is still present on the site of that 1584 bequest; the current building was constructed in 1780. Astonishingly, commercial grinding continued in the building until 1930. We discovered it by chance on a riverside amble. The museum was not open, so the fragments of information I've written here were gleaned from a display board. I think these steps are part of the restoration - they lead from the river level to the elevated pond that fed the workshop water-wheel. I assume, though it is not explicitly stated anywhere, that they are old, spent grinding wheels, commemorating, in a way, the men whose lives they cut short