Condition Of Our Chief Towns - Sheffield

[Bayleaf]

We have surveyed Birmingham, Stafford, Wolverhampton, Newcastle –upon-Tyne, Hull, Shrewsbury, and other towns; but Sheffield in all matters relating to sanitary appliances, is behind them all.

The three rivers flowing sluggishly through the town are made the conduits of all imaginable filth, and at one particular spot positively run blood.

There rivers, that should water Sheffield so pleasantly, are polluted with dirt, dust, dung, and carrion; the embankments are ragged and ruined; here and there overhung with privies; and often the site of ash and offal heaps – most desolate and sickening objects. ...

Descending Bungay Street, a region commonly called 'The Ponds' is found. A plank bridge over the Sheaf here shows dead dogs and cats floating on the slimy waters, and a terrible condition of the partially-walled banks, through outlets in which fluents of excremental slush ooze into the river.

It is 26ft wide at this point, and has all the appearance of having once been a vast covered sewer, and having now become ruined, it being impossible to realize that the objects in it were ever intended to meet sight or smell.

The river Porter, which joins the Sheaf in this part, brings further accession of filth from large districts through which it has flowed.

The ponds themselves are lakes of slush. Here a heterogeneous mass of scabby-looking cottages, isolated dung-heaps and isolated privies, and detached and semi-detached petty factories, large timber-yards, such as that of Messrs Garside & Shaw's, English and foreign timber merchants, and large factories, such as the Penzance works, Cutts Brothers, lie and jostle against each other in this stagnant valley of the ponds.

In the streets channels are cut in the pavements to convey the fluid wash from every house across the footways into the flowing gutters, a most extraordinary feature, which is apparent in the street we have just left, South Street, and which we observe in almost every street throughout the city, while clothes are hanging out to dry across comparatively wide streets.

Pond Street is occupied by small manufacturers, razor-case makers, table and Chinese scale pressers, elastic steel spectacles makers, fly, stamp, and buffin-engine makers, and the like.

Parallel with the east side of this street, and in its rear, is a narrow gullet, watered by chance overflowings from the Porter or ponds; the back premises of all the houses incline towards it, and it has become a dark rotting deposit of every imaginable description of filth and refuse. The only cleansing this sewer obtains is when a wintry flood flushes the contents into the adjoining ponds. This black, foetid, sluggish stream is nearly a quarter of a mile long.

On the opposite side of Pond Street there is a steep bank behind the front row of houses; rows of houses and factories, and courts of houses and factories, crowd here precipitously one behind the other, and upon the alleyed approaches to all these run continually steams of liquid slush, which find their way along the main gutters into the choked cesspool of grates in the streets; or failing to do this, work their way in dribbles, in the dog days, through the soil and through the tenements down to the rivers and ponds.

The market is placed on a steep decline. It consists of a nave and aisles about 260 ft long, and is excellently ventilated and paved throughout.... There are 22 butchers' shops on both sides painted green, with a fireplace in each, and with a breadth of nearly 70ft between their respective rows of fronts.

The fish and game stalls are in the centre at the lower end. Owing to the rapid fall of the site, the use of water has been obliged to be disallowed for the fish and oyster-stalls. This is of course a great drawback.

For the rest, the arrangements appear to be nearly complete. There is a good bell, hot water laid in twice a week, and cold-water taps at intervals; a capital, large, cheerful Exchange news-room up two storeys (rather grimy and sooty), over the lower extremity of the market, and a telegraph office.

In the rear of one of the public houses, called 'The Old House at Home', there is a passage with pigs at the end of it, for whose accommodation a gutter is formed, and passes the doors of houses in the passage into the street, running with liquid manure.

This district is scantily swept, and the storm-grates are full of mud. The diseases that must necessarily be bred in this district, where sanitary appliances are little known, seem to be fully recognized by one enterprising individual at least. Although there is a notice that no bills are to be stuck, this persevering individual has placarded the walls with a printed advice to 'Try Rydal's wonderful mixture for cholera, bowel complaint, and diarrhoea', indicating too surely the certainty of finding purchasers for the nostrum.

At the corner of Castle Street and Waingate stands the old-fashioned and inadequate building known as the Town Hall, but consisting merely of a petty-sessions hall and sessions-room, and a police office. It has a large clock-faced turret, with a miniature colonnaded, domed temple on top.

Affixed to one of the windows of the police office was the announcement 'Letters wrote at No. 9 Steelhouse Lane, West Bar; charge 4d'. Next door – fit supplement for the want of education among the residents implied in this notice – is a showy gin-palace.

Behind the Town Hall, in Castle Green, is another district of registered lodgings and registered common lodgings. Tea leaves and slops are sailing down the kennels, and a great fearful common ash-pit stands in the public thoroughfare, in a rounded corner of Castle green, apparently for the joint convenience of the lodging houses and the officials of the Town Hall.

Still in Waingate, which is a street of shops in the 'general line', where Joseph Linley, mechanical chimney-sweeper, is both a boiler flue-cleaner, and a dealer in soot; and E. Major's hair-cutting saloon, baths, and a cigar divan, in the Castle-court, furnishes 'a clean brush for every head'; still in Waingate, near the Town Hall, there are more ash-pits, and one close to the bar window of the Old White Hart ...

We step to a scene that baffles description – a district of slaughter-sheds for nearly the whole of Sheffield, beginning with a boiling-house for tripe, and thence slippery with gory slime and drippings from the ash-pit of the tenements above. Pailfuls of blood soak down on the surface of the ground and into the ground through the wretched paving of Slaughter Lane , and percolate from slaughter-house to slaughter-house, till the blood oozingly finds its way, together with faecal matter, into the river.

The sheds themselves are generally so rickety that the removal of the shambles to an extra-mural site could be effected with but little loss of property; but their ill condition adds to the ghastliness of the scene.

Into the river Sheaf already thus polluted pour hot and steaming sewage and cold sewage, horizontally and vertically.

Refuse is thrown into it from factories overhanging it in all directions; black ash refuse, green vegetable refuse, mud-coloured refuse; and all this is frothed up on a waterfall, or rather sewage-fall, by means of which its junction with the river Don is at this point attained.

The Builder, 'Condition of our chief towns – Sheffield', 21^st September 1861

[vox]

That's brilliant.

A couple of links:

SH LINK - Bungay Street

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Johnson : In the lower part of King street, where is now

Mr. Hunt's flour shop, was formerly the father of Mr. John

Jones, before he removed into the premises still occupied by

his son in the Market Place.

Leonard : I remember the square just above there, now

represented by Garside and Shaw's timber yard and Castle

court, where fruit and fish dealers congregated. It was

called " The Green Market," and was disused after December,

1851.

Leader - Reminiscenses of old Sheffield

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1880 - Trades

Wales Robert

Gold and Silver Chaser

Penzance works

May's yard

Pond street

Woodhead Wm

Fancy Goods Warehousemen

Penzance works

May's yard

Pond street

[RichardB]

Ditto, Vox's comment, spell-binding. Thank you.