England 2023- Sheffield

Sheffield War Memorial

Have you ever had to make your way past a bouncer while entering a restaurant for breakfast on a Sunday morning? No? Just us, then? Here’s the thing about choosing to have breakfast in the city centre of a city with a large student population- you are bound to run into drunken revellers who are still on their Saturday night out at 7am on a Sunday morning. Sheffield is ready for those rowdy students but I wasn’t. I really didn’t expect to be treading carefully around broken glass or averting my eyes from the young lads who were still shouting like they were talking above the music in a club. We had just come from a very peaceful mass where the volume of those talking was considerably lower and less jarring. I am a country mouse who is used to being accosted by the warble of a flock of turkeys, not a pack of college aged boys who think it’s cute to be shouting, “you absolute bellend!”, before we’ve had coffee. 

Witnessing this is made much more sense to have not one but two bouncers at the entrance to our restaurant of choice. Once inside we found ourselves with the quieter crowd that was now nursing their hangovers with a full English.

St Marie’s Cathedral

Sheffield hadn’t changed much since I first visited in 2004, but for my husband his hometown might have been as alien as Mars or as familiar as his own reflection depending on which direction he chose to look in. There was the familiar Town Hall, and the Peace Gardens, and over there the Cathedral which has stood in one form or another since the 13th century. But look the other direction and there are new luxury flats and unfamiliar shops. It’s hard for him to visit because it is mostly a place full of unhappy memories. The people that made it bearable have all passed on and what’s left is just a former center of steel production cut off at the knees in the 1980’s. The Sheffield of today is far more prosperous than the Sheffield of my husband’s youth, and that is the city frozen in amber like a fossil in his mind. The one he can’t shake. We never spend any meaningful time there now because the ghosts are still present and sometimes it’s best not to dredge up the past. 

What you can’t see is the broken glass and hear the loud lads behind me

We did decide to wander through the Peace Gardens and the Winter Garden on our way back to the car. On my very first visit to Sheffield in 2004 my husband took me to the Peace Gardens after an emotional experience in Sheffield Cathedral. My grandmother had died unexpectedly 6 months earlier and a small inheritance from her was the reason I could afford to jump the pond to see England for the first time. She shared my love of the British Isles and had spent so much time with me pouring over pictures and maps from her own trip several years earlier. I sat on a pew on my first morning in England, jet lagged and overwhelmed and just felt a wave of grief that I hadn’t felt since being told she died. It was a mix of happiness that she helped me get there and sadness that she wasn’t there to experience it with me. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to tell her about the things I was going to see and that broke my heart, but I was also so grateful that she had met and loved the man sitting next to me. That poor man was so confused when I burst into tears but he was already 4 years into our relationship and well versed in how to deal with me, so he whisked me off to see some plants. 

The Peace Gardens were first laid out in 1938 but the current iteration that we see today is from 1998. It features fountains and cascades, war memorials and plenty of room to sit and find some calm amidst the hustle of city life. Just around the corner you’ll find the towering Winter Garden. This lofty glasshouse holds more than 2000 plants from around the world. It’s a lush oasis nestled between buildings of stone, steel and brick. This is where I found solace in 2004 and again in 2023. This time I wasn’t running from grief but simply wanting to commune with plants after experiencing a little too much of humanity. 

The Peace Gardens from 2004

We said goodbye to Sheffield not knowing if we’d venture there again in the future, but feeling like it was a probability. Me from the future knows we skipped it in 2025 preferring to give it a wide berth but never say never.