Introduction to Archaeology in Ale
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Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
Industrial Archaeology in Sheffield with Richard Jackson
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Speaker
Hello and welcome to Episode 35 of the Archaeology in Ale podcast, a free monthly public archaeology talk brought to you by Archaeology in the City, the community outreach program from the University of Sheffield's Department of Archaeology. Due to current COVID-19 restrictions, this talk has taken place online via Google Meets, so there may be some background noise or audio feedback in our recording.
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This month our guest speaker is Richard Jackson from the Yorkshire Archaeological Trust, speaking on crucibles, pubs and slums, an overview of the industrial archaeology of Sheffield.
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As soon as you start looking into any phase of industrial archaeology in any modern city, you realise that there's a lot of this about. So this is very much just a selection of sites that I know a little bit about. OK, so here we have a site location map. It depicts the inner center part of the city of Sheffield. The cursor is currently hovering over the cathedral there, and that's Campo Lane.
Exploring Sheffield's Archaeological Sites
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got the town hall there just for orientation purposes, that's the law courts. The areas outlined in red represent the archaeological sites I'm going to be mentioning to a greater or lesser degree. This one here that I'm showing you now is
00:01:56
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the location of what was referred to as the Titanic works or partly as the Titanic works, several crucible works were established there. When we excavated it back in 2007-2008, we referred to it as the Hoyle Street site, which is where things immediately get confusing because this site just across the road
00:02:18
Speaker
is also referred to in the reports as Hoyle Street. This one however is Daniel Doncaster's Steelworks that was built initially from about the 1820s onwards and is
00:02:34
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the one that you can see quite clearly. If you ever take the tram between University and Shalesmore, you pass it coming down the hill, you can see it on the right hand side. It's a large brick cone structure.
00:02:50
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can't stop waving my hands to denote the brick comb structure but for now just you'll have to imagine it. So that's that site there, that's one of the bigger ones that was excavated just before last Christmas I think. Going up the hill a bit there, that site is referred to as Radford Street, that was again done a couple of years ago in the summer and that's an example of some domestic housing
00:03:16
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This site over here was done more years ago than I care to remember. That was done I think around 2004, 2005. That's where, if you know that part of town, it's just off Broad Lane.
The Significance of Steel Production in Sheffield
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It's where the Plus Net building is now, one of the larger.
00:03:33
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that's part of the inner redevelopment of Sheffield, and that is a mixture of various different types of industrial archaeology, so that's why you get a bit of everything. And that small thing over there is the location of the old Greyhound pub, which is going to get a mention but isn't exactly photogenic.
00:03:54
Speaker
This is a cutaway drawing of a type of fairness I'm about to discuss, but that's just going to sit there while I ramble for a little bit. The three-part title of this talk isn't exactly a rigorous set of categories either. It will hopefully become clear that there's a lot more to the ins and outs of
00:04:10
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steel production than just crucibles for example. Depending on your experience of life in Sheffield the word crucible may be more evocative of snookers and anything so remote as the batch production of bespoke high grade metals for precision engineering products. I really just intended to outline some broad themes and discuss how they're represented by the archaeological record and hopefully explain a little bit about how and why we undertake the work that we do.
00:04:38
Speaker
So the crucible in this sense represents the whole steel manufacturing process, which ultimately begins with the extraction of iron ore. So in a talk about Sheffield, I'm already veering off into the outer hinterland of this topic. By the 1700s, most of the easily exploited deposits of iron ore had already been depleted.
00:04:58
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And it's probably no coincidence that the very first steam engine was designed and built with the express purpose of removing water from deeper strata, allowing for the effective and cost effective exploitation of deeper seams containing iron ore amongst other very useful commodities such as coal.
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The extraction of both of these commodities is somewhat
Cementation Furnaces and Steelmaking
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interlinked. As a rough indication, it takes approximately three tonnes of coal to produce one tonne of steel in the crucible process. I'm not going to dwell too heavily on the extractive process, not least because it's pretty far out of my area of expertise. But it is worth mentioning that this first viable steam engine was known as the Newcomen atmospheric engine.
00:05:43
Speaker
and the only example of that engine that still exists in its original intended location can be found not too far away from where we are now. It's at Elsica Heritage Centre near Barnsley and that is, I believe, open to the public for guided tours still. Certainly, that site has remained open through a lot of lockdown so it's the kind of thing that you can in better times book to go and see and it does still actually operate at certain times. The engine
00:06:13
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was invented by a chap called Thomas Newcomen in 1712 and is in common use across the country by 1725.
00:06:23
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The first applications were for removing water from tin mines down in Cornwall, but in the end thousands of those engines were ultimately produced for use in the UK, with several engines also manufactured for export across Europe, and at least one ended up being utilised in the deep opencast mines in a place called Danemura in Sweden.
00:06:46
Speaker
And that's significant, not just because I need to practice my Swedish accent whenever I can, but it's a significant sight to mention in this context, because although iron ore is a pretty commonly occurring group of minerals, the quality composition and disposition of those deposits is highly variable. And many types are unsuitable for high quality steel manufacturing. But the own cast mines in Danamora just happen to produce a particular grade of iron ore
00:07:15
Speaker
that included, amongst other things, the lowest known levels of things like sulfur and phosphorus, and they were considered to be the best available ore for steelmaking by steelmakers in Sheffield. That's the point. The whole point of this up is that this is a schematic drawing of a salutation furnace, which is part of the primary, most method of steel manufacture in Sheffield, and indeed everywhere it's done.
00:07:40
Speaker
This is a cutaway drawing through a cementation furnace. This is a plan view you see here and this up here is a cross section. I'm about to show you photos that show the real thing but this is a really useful schematic. You can see the central axis here which is a flue with a grate on top of it and that's
00:08:04
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Those are referred to as fire bars often. You can see just there, I think. That's where the actual fire was set. And basically what you have here is a structure designed around these two central chests, denoted with the letter A. I hope you can see those okay there. And again, you can see them in plan here.
00:08:25
Speaker
Those are the sandstone chests into which the iron bars are loaded, and I'll describe more of that process in a second. But you can see here the flue system. It's all about getting in a steady draft there through the lit fire, which then helps transmit the hot gases up and around the structures and heating them evenly and consistently.
00:08:50
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and also allowing for the exhaust gases to be removed at a constant rate because this is really all about getting the correct amount of carbon into the steel, sorry, into the iron to make it steel.
00:09:02
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So here you can see a picture of the inside of the cementation furnace that still stands today at Doncaster Street. A talk of this nature wouldn't be complete, unfortunately or fortunately, without a quick overview of the multi-stage process of steel production and how it relates to the various iconic monuments in Sheffield.
00:09:20
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So once the Swedish iron bars arrive in Sheffield, the first stage of the process was to convert the iron into a material called blister steel, which is essentially iron that was approximately 1% extra carbon. That was undertaken in these cementation furnaces. The particular part of the process isn't that complicated really. The bars of Swedish iron are placed into two large sandstone chests located in the furnace, either side of that central flue channel.
00:09:47
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The iron bar is then covered with a layer of charcoal and then topped with another layer of iron bar and so on and so on until the chests are almost full to the top. After the final layer of charcoal was added, the entire chests were sealed with a layer of refractory material, colloquially known as crozzle, which is a mixture of various sands and minerals and the broken up remains of previous crozels.
00:10:12
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So that aids the thermal insulation at each chest, stops them getting too cold at the top, and prevented too much oxygen getting in. Once the sap fire was set along the central fire grate, the furnace was bricked up mostly and left to cook for around about a week.
00:10:29
Speaker
The only holes that remained slightly agile were small apertures on the side of the furnace that could be opened, usually covered by hatches, briefly to allow furnace operators to monitor the state of the fire. No instrumentation was used for this purpose. A skilled and experienced operator could just look at the color of the flames and also at the color of the iron bars as they heated up to gauge their temperature. The bars weren't melted as part of this process, they were simply heated to the correct temperature to carbonize
00:10:58
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the iron to the required amount. At the end of that process, they're allowed to cool and the iron bars have then been converted to blister steel, hence the alternative name for cementation furnaces as converting furnaces. Blister steel is so-called simply because the bars look like they've blistered when they come out of the furnace on completion of that stage of the process. So once you've got your blister steel,
00:11:26
Speaker
There's two sort of reaps out for that. The initial sort of traditional method that was quite small scale was that you could forge weld them together. You chop up the bars, which are usually about five or six meters long, into easily manageable pieces. You stack them up together and you forge weld them. You heat them and repeatedly strike them with hammers.
00:11:47
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which creates sheer steel.
Challenges in Archaeological Preservation
00:11:49
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You can't do that more than about three or four times, otherwise you begin to over carbonate and it gets too soft. The alternative method is to break the blister seal up into small pieces, load them into a crucible pot and melt them down in a crucible furnace. This is the process that developed around about the 1740s in Sheffield and beyond.
00:12:16
Speaker
The best surviving example of the fermentation furnace, I'm biased, I'd say it's probably the best surviving example in the world, but there's, I think, some earlier ones around Colbrookdale that may have a small claim on that. So this furnace that you're looking at now can be found just down our virtual road.
00:12:35
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Daniel Doncaster Steelworks alongside what is now Hoyle Street. It's located between Doncaster Street and Meadow Street. Up until a few years ago the Scheduled Monument was almost invisible amongst the HSBC buildings and the former British Steel metallurgical workshops which were inherited from the final days of the Doncasters. Recent demolition works however have removed almost all the 20th century architecture.
00:13:02
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leaving the cone of the furnace much more visible to passengers on the passing trams. The standing furnace is both a scheduled monument and a listed building and as such absolutely no redevelopment of the area of the site could take place without an extensive program of archaeological mitigation from which most of the images in this presentation are taken. This photo that you're looking at now was taken by our standing buildings archaeologists
00:13:30
Speaker
Simply because although you can technically access that furnace at any time you should get the key off the keeper at the museum. It's just easier and safer to do it when there's a bit more structure access and scaffolding was built on the outside to allow him to get to the right height to.
00:13:45
Speaker
Well, to put the scale rod in for a start, I mean that always does my heart like to see a scale rod in the proper situation. But Chris had to essentially get his entire front half of his body into the furnace and just take some pictures of his arms stretched out and hope for the best.
00:14:01
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and it turned out okay I think you can see on the sides here this is a sandstone chest here that's another sandstone chest there and this is that central flu passageway that was was hopefully clear on the diagrams you can just make out these are the series of arches um that would be that were constructed from refractory brick or fire clay brick as it's also known so that basically provides some structural support for the whole thing and stops it sort of failing and thinking
00:14:31
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in on itself during repeated fire. And you can see how, for want of a better term, gnarly the whole thing looks. Over time, deposits accrete on these structures. There's enough metal oxides in the atmosphere that it starts to deposit a very thin sheen of everything. And it looks quite amazing, really, but it's also very tricky to plan, frankly, in some cases.
00:15:01
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So here we can see a scale drawing, the sort of things we produce for our reports. This is most of the Hoyle Street site that you can see, the one with the cementation furnaces on. Crucially, the one thing that isn't on these plans is that cementation furnace you were just looking at. That sits here.
00:15:23
Speaker
And it's a boring reason that sounds like an excuse, but the reason we don't produce plans of those things is because it's a scheduled monument and it's not going anywhere. That is protected by some of the highest and most robust legislation protection that archaeology gets in this country.
00:15:43
Speaker
So those photos are only taken for monitoring purposes. What you see here is the archaeology that's around it. If any of you are at all familiar with that site, you'll know that it's basically been car parks around a lot of that for a long time. And a few more modern buildings that, thankfully, were relatively shallow foundations. But what you can see here
00:16:05
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is we split the whole site up into areas just because things get excavated in sequence when you're dealing with the logistics of large areas on site. It's a layout that's quite squeezed in in a way. This is the base of a cementation furnace. You can see here that's mostly outlined in purple. Again, the purple denotes a crozzle, which is just sort of accreted on the base part of the structure.
00:16:32
Speaker
Most of them, 99% of them are made out of brick with a few sandstone embellishments. So the base foundation is essentially two large brick rectangles with a central flue down the middle of them that you can see there. These transverse elements are piers made out of sandstone and they sit on top of the brick structure and then the sandstone chest sits on top of those piers. So that's how the flue structures are formed. So you've got alternating
00:17:00
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bricks of sandstone structures in empty space to allow a free flow of air around.
00:17:09
Speaker
What you don't see so well on this plan, but hopefully you'll see in the next image is some of the detail around that structure. But broadly speaking, you've got one pretty well-preserved foundation of the cementation furnace here. And then you've got a stoking cellar, which is directly physically attached to the side of the furnace there.
00:17:31
Speaker
And interestingly on this side that then actually turns a corner, a right angle corner and comes around here and connects up to a second cementation furnace here. It looks like that's just a factor of them trying to fit as many furnaces as they could into a relatively constrained space. There's no real reason to deviate from a linear plan unless you're trying to fit things in.
00:17:55
Speaker
You can see we've got this big swathe of material here that is actually responsible unfortunately for the truncation of a lot of this one. It's a quirk of most sorts of archaeology is that you get lots of really great preservation in one area and then a few meters away you get almost total destruction. That's a modern storm rain that was probably put in in the late 70s or the early 80s.
00:18:19
Speaker
Again, it is quite heartbreaking in a way because it just ripped a big hole through the middle of it. But from a pragmatic point of view, you've got both ends of it. You can see the dimensions of it. You can spatially locate where it was. So it could have been a lot worse. And this structure here is a coal bunker that's attached to the main working surfaces there.
00:18:40
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We infer from that these areas that a sandstone flag were actually kept relatively clear because it needed to get physical access into these things and that the fuel was stored elsewhere.
00:18:52
Speaker
Over here, quite close by, conveniently close by, in fact, that is a crucible furnace there. And this is just the remains of another one over here, connected by a large sort of unifying cellar.
Crucible Furnaces and Sheffield’s Steel History
00:19:07
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As happens with these things, once the crucible furnaces themselves fall out of use, the cellars
00:19:11
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still often have a purpose so the reason it doesn't look quite as aesthetically pleasing and the reason I haven't really included any photos of this one is because all these walls have been basically replaced or masked by poured concrete foundations. As you go further to the northeast up in this direction we see some some more irregular construction that isn't anything directly furnace related but it's part of the very late 19th century
00:19:41
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continuing usage of the site. We think this is a waybridge foundation up here. Again, weighing, assaying is very important when you're dealing with such large quantities of material going in and out. It allows you to monitor both your quality and of course your commercial output.
00:19:59
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this area kept getting rebuilt it was the focus of activity is a useful site to have so structures like this this funny angle wall reflects an attempt at rebuilding that still respected some of the structural boundaries over in this corner we've got some very.
00:20:17
Speaker
ephemeral, for want of a better term, remains of earlier domestic structures. We spend quite a lot of time looking at things like that because any site like this is also an attempt to have a look at the pre-existing conditions before it was effectively colonised by industry. This was part of an area known as townfields up until the 1800s where it was finally demarcated for development and all of this happened.
00:20:45
Speaker
Although this talk is mostly about industrial archaeology, we are always attempting to make some attempt to quantify what was there before. And we did get a few shirts of post-med potteries and blackware and a couple of shirts of middling purpleware, which is sort of a 15th, 16th century ceramic. Never very much, unfortunately.
00:21:10
Speaker
But we try to just make a 360-degree approach and make sure that people are aware that we're not focusing entirely on the Victoria. This here is produced by photogrammetry. It's one of those shots that you put up and people often quite fairly assume that we hired a drone for the day and flew that over.
00:21:31
Speaker
This is much cheaper. What you can see here is, again, that cementation furnace that was appearing on the plan, that's the main structure of it there. And you can just make out some brick and sandstone structures around it.
00:21:48
Speaker
These external structures are the base of the foundation for the brick cone, the only bit that most of us ever see. And that's obviously a big way to needs to be basically independent, I think, of the foundations for the central business part of the furnace. And a bit more clearly, you can see that the detail on the sandstone floor.
00:22:10
Speaker
Yeah, it sort of does make it clear. Well, that was winter. It was very wet. The blank areas are actually just completely filled puddles of water. That doesn't cope too well with photogrammetry. But just to explain what photogrammetry is, that's where we pick a day where we've got the site clean and there isn't going to be any terrible weather.
00:22:30
Speaker
and we take hundreds and hundreds of digital photographs of the site and just go along by hand or with a camera on a pole as well and then those photos are geo-referenced by some digital survey that we do and they're fed into a computer and we've got some nice software that effectively builds a 3D model of the site based on our photographs.
00:22:57
Speaker
It's lovely to use when it works because it produces things like this that I can then put in presentations. And fundamentally that's part of our primary record now. 15 years ago when we first started doing, well when I first started doing commercial industrial archaeology, everything had to be planned by hand. So you know you got some permatracing aboard and spent
00:23:21
Speaker
what felt like forever, drawing things by hand at scale, which is a wonderful skill to have, of course, but this is quicker and just produce a bit more of a flexible product. The crucible process allows for the fine tuning of the composition of the steel. That's basically what it's all about. Other additives such as manganese or nickel are added in small amounts to change the chemical properties of the steel, resulting in maybe a harder or a longer lasting product.
00:23:51
Speaker
The steel ingots themselves had a much more consistent or homogenous quality to them and could then either be manufactured into finished products locally or shipped off to other factories around the world as a whole material.
00:24:03
Speaker
As the art of steelmaking developed throughout the 19th century, many of the steelworks added a metallurgical laboratory of some kind to their premises equipped with the necessary tools to assay their products for quality and strength. But it is again worth noting that this process began in a very furtive and secretive manner. Any records of the process consist of semi-coded scribblings in private notebooks, which don't always survive to the present day. Or if they do survive, they end up in private hands because
00:24:32
Speaker
they become part of the chattels of one particular business, that business potentially survives much longer than the people who wrote the notebooks. And if that business then gets bought out by a foreign company or a company located elsewhere, everything gets moved. So that information is frequently lost.
00:24:51
Speaker
And of course the actual day-to-day work, as we can see here, would have been carried out by people who were mostly illiterate anyway and therefore unable to write their own histories, but were people who could determine the temperature of a furnace by the colour of the flame. If the process of making creasable steel sounds straightforward, that is because I have oversimplified it.
00:25:14
Speaker
Modern experimental attempts to recreate the types of steel made in creasable furnaces tend not to work very well. In this case, I'm referring to the particularly scientific television program called Time Team, where they came to Sheffield once and tried to make some Sheffield steel again. It didn't go so well. It's a complex process, where if you have a few grams difference here and there, it can create an entirely different product. There's another reason
00:25:44
Speaker
for the lack of documentary sources and that is secrecy. Industrial espionage is very much a hallmark of the so-called industrial revolution and it is clear that the people in possession of vital steelmaking secrets were well aware of the game they were playing.
00:26:00
Speaker
The information attracts nefarious purposes. For instance, there is a story, which appears in an early 20th century I encyclopedia Britannica, a local iron founded by the name of Walker who took it upon himself to gain access to Benjamin Huntsman steel foundry.
00:26:22
Speaker
of the crucible steelmaking process. It is actually unclear as to whether he truly invented it himself or borrowed a few techniques from here and there, but history records him as the inventor of the crucible steel process. Walker inveigled his way into Benjamin Huntsman's steelworks one night by disguising himself as a starving beggar who only wanted to sleep by a warm fire for the night.
00:26:46
Speaker
And when the night was over, the warm beggar went away having learnt how to make crucible steel via the Huntsman process. Huntsman crucially hadn't patented his steel making process, which seemed to act as justification for this type of espionage. Steel could make a lot of money, but it seems that the information has always been currency.
00:27:07
Speaker
So a crucible furnace is a slightly more complex structure with more moving parts and more human interaction. As we can see here, this is an actual photograph taken of what is purported to be the last crucible melt on Shoreham Street to a different place altogether. But again, that's the back wall there, which is where the chimneys go up to vent the hot gases. Along the floor here, you can see a row of hatches. Those cover individual melting holes.
00:27:37
Speaker
Each chimney and flue below ground and a chimney above ground, each individual chimney and flue is connected to a dedicated melting hole where the crucible pots full of broken blister seal are lowered. The actual size of the crucible furnace is not at all standardised. Earlier furnaces tended to be smaller with fewer holes, whereas the furnaces built in the latter half of the 19th century
00:28:01
Speaker
tended to be much larger to maximise output for truly enormous castings in order to produce the required enormous quantities for ingots for railway construction or for armaments and armour, steel casings for gun batteries on ships and things like that and lead up to World War I. The crucibles could be single or crucible, single crucibles or double crucibles where you have a single row of crucible holes down one side or a row down each other, a row down each side.
00:28:32
Speaker
The general design and layout tends to be relatively consistent, indicating these furnaces were built to a plan, but that plan was then adapted for available space.
00:28:44
Speaker
that again in typical of earlier ones that slightly more higgledy-piggly but the massive later crucible furnaces such as the Sanderson Kaiser works out in Darnall basically required wholesale redevelopment of an entire plot to create an integrated work of sufficient size.
00:29:02
Speaker
and that's where you see a greater degree of organization of space. Above ground there's not a lot to these structures really, as you can see, individual hatches with an iron frame around them and a refractory clay brick lid, racks and racks of crucible pots waiting to be used. You can tell that these are the unused ones simply because they look so neat and clean.
00:29:28
Speaker
It's said that you only get about three or four uses. They did reuse them but the successive heating just makes them incredibly friable and then they shatter. So empty pots loaded with broken bits of blister steel.
00:29:46
Speaker
I think that's at the back there that might be one of the large shovels used to do the loading. Loading there takes about three hours to get the molten. Once they're molten they're removed. You see these long handled tongs here, an essential part of the work.
00:30:06
Speaker
a little wheeled cart there that you could potentially lean the ingot molds or the crucible pots on to transmit them over to here. This is a part away from the actual arch of the crucible vaulting underneath. You can see, I don't know if you can see, there's a slight slope to the floor here. That's not just put in for aesthetic purposes. It's to reflect the fact that this whole thing is built on a vaulted arch.
00:30:33
Speaker
and then you have an ingot mould here that's set into the floor. That's one thing that does show up archaeologically sometimes, there are sometimes these little recesses into the floor over at this side, presumably because no one in their right mind wants to actually hold an ingot mould as someone else is pouring molten steel into it.
Understanding Industrial Lives through Archaeology
00:30:55
Speaker
this is a fundamental part of the process you find. You do find Ingot molds here and there. We did get one I think during the excavation of Hoyle Street. They're pretty rare. But that is really the careful, consistent part of the job. You can just about see him, the tongs in his hand that he's using there,
00:31:18
Speaker
I think up against the back wall there, those look like ingot moulds that have been prepared ready to use. The other thing to just point out is the small little block shape on the bottom of that crucible pot that we will refer back to shortly. So like any industrial process, the production of steel can be superficially simplified to a number of apparently straightforward steps. This does tend to mean that industrial archaeology as a discipline can focus
00:31:49
Speaker
almost exclusively on those readily definable steps and the visible furnaces, forges and mills that house them. This is something of a reduction, as archaeology is of course supposed to be the study of cultures via the material culture they have left behind, as opposed to the study of that material culture for its own sake.
00:32:07
Speaker
There is a tendency to focus on, particularly with industrial archaeology, to focus on those iconic great works and their architects. For example, Thomas Telford and Ironbridge, Brunel and his railways and other amazing engineering works, Arkwright and his mills and so on. Whereas the people who actually do the work and populate these sites are effectively rendered anonymous by history.
00:32:33
Speaker
It falls to archaeology to attempt to add some degree of the texture of everyday existence to a broader historical narrative. Accurate descriptions of the living conditions for the vast majority of people at that time are comparatively hard to come by, particularly in a local sense.
00:32:50
Speaker
an almost overlooked aspect of archaeology is the, for want of a better term, the very existential nature of the evidence we look at on a regular basis. It's one thing to read through Gaskell or Dickens, or to cite passages from books such as the London Labour and the London Poor, or even something by Marx.
00:33:08
Speaker
But it is something else to be able to directly and carefully excavate and record any significant representative examples of the actual places these people called home or work. We are, of course, aware that our work can only ever really scratch the surface of the reality of their circumstances. But the complexities of an interconnected series of cellars is quite a visceral demonstration of the echoes left by lives that were unregarded in most other ways.
00:33:38
Speaker
These traces of individuality do not exclusively belong to the domestic areas we look at, but certainly seem to be mostly blotted out in the workshops and steelworks, where the label was the identity and the material culture was the product.
00:33:54
Speaker
What we're looking at now is a site across the road from the site we were just looking at. So this is actually the whole crucible furnace but it was immediately adjacent to the Titanic works. I put this in
00:34:09
Speaker
because it's just a fairly representative example of what a good creasable furnace looks like when you find it in the wild, as it were. Again, industrial archaeology sites are not pretty. This was an area we had to go to after several phases of demolition and remediation had been done.
00:34:32
Speaker
but you can still see quite a lot of detail is preserved here. It's lost, you know, obviously the floor surface is gone, the vaulting has gone, but you can still see these individual brick piers, each one of which forms the flue passageway that then feeds the cool fresh air
00:34:52
Speaker
into the melting hole and then the exhaust gases end up being drawn out through the flue, sorry the chimneys which are all based on these rear part of this structure here. Some details are apparent even when it's been truncated a bit for example, I don't know if you can see from this but there were two extra flue passages at this end but for some reason they've been blocked up, we were never able to ascertain precisely why but it does demonstrate that these things get
00:35:22
Speaker
tweaked, they're never completely perfect from the word go. And because, well, frankly, because the county archaeologist is very interested in structures like this, we were certainly well supported by Sheffield Council, by the South Yorkshire Archaeology Service and their monitoring visits and their encouragement to do more.
00:35:47
Speaker
This is what we did to it. It's quite brutal, but we knew this was going to get destroyed anyway, so we used a machine to cut a section through the structure.
00:35:59
Speaker
And again, it's not earth shattering, but it clearly demonstrates that there is some sort of face construction to these sorts of structures. You can see just by virtue of the fact that the rear part is made from red brick and fire brick, but it's bonded with white line mortar, whereas all the pier structures
00:36:20
Speaker
are exclusively bonded with black ash mortar which is generally considered to be typologically later and it certainly denotes separate phases of work so you've probably got the primary building of it at one point and we would infer that maybe there's been consistent rebuilding or alteration that's been done at a later stage and this
00:36:43
Speaker
It's the same furnace, but a bit later on, we were just trying to assess what had happened to those blocked up passages. So you can see there's a front of one of the piers there. That's the flu there. That's a blocked up flu there. That's a pier there. That's a pier. That's me trying to carry on working through some miserable weather and just take some water samples. It's not pretty, but it had to be done, apparently.
00:37:15
Speaker
Now, that was generally considered at the time when we found it to be a pretty good, well-survived, increaseable furnace. Then we went a little further south, and this is part of the investigations where we were looking at the Titanic works.
00:37:31
Speaker
That's what we saw when we had the concrete slab of an area removed. It was known that it had been the location of a crucible furnace, we didn't know what sort of state it was in, so I very carefully asked the JCB to remove the concrete and this is pretty much how that looked as soon as that had happened.
00:37:47
Speaker
It's not terribly clean but I hope you can see along here we've got some square-ish holes there. Those are the bases of the chimney stack and a line along here we've got the melting holes themselves. They're missing their nice neat lids
00:38:05
Speaker
because you've lost maybe four or five courses of brickwork off the top of this structure. But these are very characteristic shapes. They are essentially voids because that's where you literally lower the crucible pot in to get heated up. It's packed round with coal or coke and it's lit. The hole itself is lined with a packing of Gannister clay, which is a refractory clay, which has heat-retentive properties, and more of that later. Just to the right here,
00:38:35
Speaker
You can hopefully see, again, sort of the traces of some vaulted brickwork there that suggested there might be an intact structure below. There was a hole in it. To be honest, I did that because we were told to evaluate the structure, so that's what you do. Once we'd done that, it became apparent that this wasn't just your regular backfilled seller.
Post-Industrial Uses of Archaeological Sites
00:39:04
Speaker
This is what it looks like inside. It was very much as if it had just been abandoned one day and people had never gone back. We found out that this structure had been reused in the 1940s as an air raid shelter. Presumably it wasn't actually working live as a furnace then. This is also suggested by the render you have on the walls there. It doesn't look like
00:39:28
Speaker
a working furnace should look. If you had that sort of render on it would just crumble off almost immediately due to the heating. But some of the tools may well be handovers from from that period of use. Some of the tools except for those because those are mine. And you can just see the handles of my wheelbarrow poking into shot there. This I must apologize because it's not the greatest quality of photo but it was a little bit dusty in there.
00:39:52
Speaker
That's the reverse angle view from a slightly higher viewpoint. Again, things just casually left about. I'm not saying that these are all primary fixtures and fittings from the early 1800s, but they certainly represent a continuum of activity. And it's nice to see the thing in its full entirety. Here we've got those those flew passageways again that each relate to one of those melting holes.
00:40:18
Speaker
This is genuinely a site you never get to see much. This is looking into one of those flues. That's the removable metal structures. Again, these things were designed to be cleaned and regularly rebuilt. So you've got a little grate there. I'm pointing with my finger, that's ridiculous. You've got a little grate there, which is a square open grate, which is just a support for everything that goes above.
00:40:40
Speaker
Individually there, you can see all these little metal rods. They were packed in and basically hammered into place to stop everything falling through. So it allowed air through, but it kept most of the ash and stuff burning material where it needed to be around the crucible pot. Now, this is a secondary crucible cellar that sort of went off at right angles from the first one.
00:41:06
Speaker
Again, completely intact and actually more interesting from an archaeological point of view because it hasn't been rendered. This is literally how it would have looked. Two things to note here, there's this big pile of what may be left over clay in the side. It's interesting to find it right there because it would probably be in someone's way at some point. This could be raw materials either for gangster lining or for manufacturing of crucible pots.
00:41:35
Speaker
was done on site. The other interesting thing to note, and this is really a hallmark of a very well preserved site, these wooden structures, these wooden items rather here, are formers. As I alluded to earlier, crucible structures like this were in a constant state of
00:42:00
Speaker
use which meant they were constantly in need of repair. The temperatures used are just not good for brickwork generally even if you use refractory brick they've got a limited life. The gangster lining of the melting holes would fail eventually so that needed to be repaired and replaced so you just take the whole thing out leave the superstructure in and then you lower one of those formers in and pack the clay around it so you end up with a nice consistent shape.
00:42:26
Speaker
Yeah, you only see those at one or two places in Sheffield, and I suspect there's one or two at the Industrial History Museum as well. Again, we did very little actual cleaning in here. This is pretty much exactly how we found it. And this...
00:42:43
Speaker
is a cheese board, for want of a better term. These individual items are colloquially referred to as cheeses. If you remember that picture of the melt in Shoreham Street, and I pointed out that little blocky item on the bottom of the crucible pot, that's what these are. These are effectively drinks coasters, in a way. When you take the crucible pot out, you don't really want to put it directly on the floor if you have to put it down for any reason, because
00:43:12
Speaker
it could damage the pot or it could damage the floor one way or another you're looking at potential catastrophe so you have these as a little insulator and generally speaking they tend to adhere quite quickly to the base of the crucible pot it's not uncommon to find base fragments of crucible pots with ease still stuck to them but again
Domestic and Industrial Archaeology Insights
00:43:32
Speaker
This demonstrates the state of preservation of this structure. This pile of material is exactly where it would have been. It would have been recognisable to someone from the 19th century and presumably was in use for quite some time.
00:43:48
Speaker
obviously never actually removed, someone saw fit to just leave those where they were because they were of no value, no scrap value at all, and the place was never officially cleared out, it was just blocked up and abandoned.
00:44:09
Speaker
Here we go back to the other Hoyle Street, back at the Daniel Longcaster side. And this is where we start talking about the more ephemeral aspects of industrial archaeology that are often suborned by the much more obvious industrial features. You're looking at the other part of the Hoyle Street site here, which is up at the southwest corner of the site.
00:44:35
Speaker
This is actually our diagram that we again we produced from the photogrammetry which I'll show you next but this is kind of a good schematic overview. This area here was occupied by the rear of a pub called the Sheffield Arms. It was we believe the first building that was officially developed on that entire site. The crucible furnaces actually came later
00:45:01
Speaker
which really does back up my belief that the massive wheels of the Industrial Revolution required a steady supply of alcohol to keep turning. Popes were ubiquitous of course. It's a shame because the line of the road along this side of site changed a bit. The pavement was widened and pushed back at some point so we don't get
00:45:27
Speaker
the actual footprint of the pub. What we do get, which is not entirely clear on this diagram here, but you can see these three little structures here, those are the barrel hatch steps down into the pub cellar. There's a central steps with two ramps on either side. Classic pub archaeology, if there is such a thing, and if there isn't such a thing there, should be.
00:45:56
Speaker
It's perhaps interesting in terms of the spatial alignment of these sites that the barrel hatch isn't out the front, as you might see in a lot of later pubs. The barrel hatch is round the rear, suggesting that it was maybe reflecting the original composition of these sorts of sites.
00:46:15
Speaker
whereby all the structures tended to be arranged around a central courtyard one way or another. They weren't open access, not the way we think of housing estates and things today, where you could just walk in in between all different manners of buildings. There was controlled access. You generally got in and out one or two ways, and there was certainly only one way for vehicular access. So your dray probably came in here, offloaded its barrels on this surface here, and then those were pushed down the steps.
00:46:44
Speaker
and of course the empty barrels come away. Worth pointing out as well because I'll come back to these photos later when we talk about domestic things as well. These are the remains of some of the domestic housing that was on the site. Again you don't get much of it in a lot of sites in Sheffield because it's unfortunately near the perimeter of the site because of the quirk of how these things are laid out and again the pavement on that side was also altered.
00:47:09
Speaker
but you do see quite a few clustered little domestic structures around the place. That there is actually a rendered floor of a cellar into which those lines had been carved. It seemed like they had, as I will allude to in a few slides time, they had problems with water ingress into their cellars. It seems that they've taken great pains to actually insert drainage
00:47:37
Speaker
and also to create these little gutters within the floor surface because it was probably a constant running stream as is, I believe, still a problem in some cellars in Sheffield houses today. This is the photogrammetry plot of the same diagram that you just saw. Again, I think you can just, if I move my laser point out of the way for a second, you can just see some steps there, back of the pub there.
00:48:06
Speaker
presume the yard surface in here unfortunately the preservation wasn't perfect so we don't get like an intact cobble surface or anything but we do get the cartle passage here made of the ubiquitous sandstone sets and then a change in use of space here so we're into the backyard of the pub here we think. This structure here is the urinal
00:48:30
Speaker
And that's a close photo there. Yes, it's not the prettiest of features, I know, but it is there and is a relatively rare aspect of industrial archaeology.
00:48:44
Speaker
generally the preservation of sites gets worse as sewerage comes in, generally speaking. You start getting more and more truncating events happening where new pipes are being laid and things like that, but this seems to have gone in sort of hand in hand with that. Small cobble surface to one site, you can just see up there that's where the barrel hatch was and that's our little sandstone floor there.
00:49:11
Speaker
This is a salt-blazed stoneware trough effectively that starts there and comes all the way around here with just enough room for one person to get in and out at a time through this cubicle of misery. It drains out here, we think. The interesting thing in terms of archaeological sequencing is that this had a concrete floor put in later. So as we would expect with pubs that are still in use today again,
00:49:39
Speaker
the older Victorian or Georgian structures get incorporated if they're not a complete nuisance or if there's not a good reason to get rid of them. So a later concrete floor poured in here and potentially we weren't able to tie it down but potentially another structure tacked on the back here that may reflect the use of water closets or something like that. The thing that gives me nightmares about this sort of site is that, and I'll just pop back to
00:50:09
Speaker
that image just because it demonstrates it quite well. There you've got urinals with at best questionable drainage. This is a freshwater well.
00:50:25
Speaker
which we found after re-machining. You can't see it on the photogrammetry plot because it's beneath this. We were asked to machine through this and have a look at it because the maps from the time did suggest there was some sort of pump there. Myself and Laura, the project officer at the site were quite cynical. I have to admit the chances of finding anything underneath there because usually it's never there. Dynasage was right. We were wrong. I'll happily admit to that. That's what we found.
00:50:55
Speaker
That is the freshwater well we think that, you know, can't prove it, but they were probably extracting drinking water from there. We certainly know they were extracting water because of this wooden structure here. This is a hollowed out tree trunk that was used as a spigot that went down about five or six meters into that well and would have had a pump of some sort fitted on top of it.
00:51:22
Speaker
It's quite an unusual apparatus to find in Sheffield. We were very lucky to find it at all, it has to be said. We attempted to sample that bit of wood, because obviously when you find wood on an industrial site, you want to try and get a decent sample of it, because it could be very useful if you get a decent tree-ring dating sequence off of it. It fell apart. It was ready to utterly degrade. It wasn't in the best of preservation environments, frankly. It is not flag-fed down there.
00:51:52
Speaker
but it was definitely used for that purpose. So we have this interesting juxtaposition of a real attempt to source fresh water for this site because this was no mean feat to install, yet it's very close to where the effluent and the urinals were situated. We suspect that they had issues with drainage here generally. Well Meadow Street and Watery Lane and things like that, you get lots of street names around there that suggest it was
00:52:21
Speaker
a poorly draining nightmare with lots of different underground springs. So this was probably partly an attempt to get fresh water, but also an attempt to mitigate the runoff with extra drains and things like that being situated around the place. And this is
00:52:37
Speaker
Again, this is that little corner of housing that we lost a lot of, but still get a little bit to assess and look at. They're generally archaeologically quite complicated structures simply because there's lots of phased rebuilding to them. They do represent the footprint of a domestic dwelling. We're not looking at very big spaces here. That's the main lesson to take away, of course. I mean, they're not probably significantly much
00:53:06
Speaker
smaller than a lot of the commercial flats that are built around the same area now, ironically. But you get a bit of an indication of the phasing. The back wall's quite consistent, but it is two different walls. That's a white line mortar wall. That's a black ash mortar wall. The front, where it fronts onto the road here, is not consistent.
00:53:27
Speaker
We suspect truncation has occurred as the pavement's been moved perhaps. This here probably represents a structure that went all the way up to the road but then got subsumed by successive
00:53:40
Speaker
stages of rebuilding. This thing here, we believe to be the base of the cesspit. We did get a few bits of material culture out of that, nothing of any great antiquity for the site. Again, of course, those structures would be cleaned out relatively regularly, one would hope. But there's still a nice layered sequence of deposits that you just don't get. I think if memory serves me something like about 30% of the entire pottery assemblage for the entire site,
00:54:09
Speaker
came from that deposit. But again, within a few metres of each other you've got an attempt at modern, as we would call it, modern sanitation. You've got access to water sources and then right next to that you've got a cesspit that would have been actively leaching material, shall we say. The pub as we know it
00:54:35
Speaker
is almost a refinement of the places people would have regularly bought their alcohol from in the early 19th century. So pubs were common, but tap houses were also a common feature on practically every street corner, where a mug of beer could be bought from a barrel kept in basically someone's front room through a purpose-built hatch in their front wall. Details like that are almost never represented in the archaeological record. Historical research is obviously a vital strand to the work that we do.
00:55:03
Speaker
But pubs do represent quite a conundrum due to their rare appearance in the archaeological record and that's simply because
00:55:09
Speaker
they either survive into the modern times and are still in use, such as, of course, the Red Deer, the Dog and Partridge down on Camp Olane, which I am, sorry, Trip Olane, it's been so long since I've been there, I can't remember the name of the road. And Fagans, of course, all of those three pubs are broadly contemporary with each other, and they're kind of, I think, built around the 1830s, 1840s, so,
00:55:36
Speaker
They are kind of isolated islands of preservation, so either that happens and they're still places you can visit and hopefully one day return to, or they're completely rendered anonymous within the bricks and mortar of the general archaeological record of the time, which explains why we do get quite excited if we do find a well-preserved pub cellar.
00:55:59
Speaker
Unfortunately, in this case, of the Hoyle Street site, we didn't get to dig much of the cellar. And inevitably, unfortunately, material culture that we did find tended to reflect the end stage of use, rather than any interesting earlier bits. We got a lot of sort of rusty electrical switchgear and bits of storyline and great and things like that. We always have to have a look at these things, but
00:56:27
Speaker
It's a shame because, of course, if the pub is repurposed because to commercial developers it's just a building, it basically becomes invisible. The Greyhound, which I did mention at the start of the talk, which is located alongside Shalesmore,
00:56:44
Speaker
We always refer to it as the grey hound in when we were digging it. Unfortunately, it's not really there, or it certainly wasn't there when we dug it up. It had been reused as a building that became the foundation for Scrapiards. So again, we got a central cellar with a sloping access ramp into it, presumably for coal or barrels we never knew. But that was that.
00:57:06
Speaker
So they, despite the fact that they reflect such a vibrant aspect of life and existence in those times until today, it doesn't take much for them to utterly vanish. Okay, and that I think takes us on to the final part of the talk, which is slums.
00:57:27
Speaker
I deliberately put the word slums in inverted commas because that word itself is an incredibly loaded term, which has come to signify a certain depth of economic depravity almost. It seems to be very much a term that's applied in retrospect, all by people who didn't live in those places themselves, people who were appalled at the conditions that they saw and were seeking to throw as much improvement their way as they possibly could.
00:57:57
Speaker
So it is a term that's applied in retrospect, and it does belie a considerable degree of complexity. It can be safely assumed that someone living in, say, the Croftsock Tentistry, or the various courts of housing that could be found all over the city, wouldn't have considered themselves to be living in a slum.
00:58:15
Speaker
The term only seems to gain traction almost in hindsight and particularly as various acts of parliament are passed and money becomes available to quote-unquote solve the problem. It's worth noting that it seems that the money
00:58:31
Speaker
made available for slum clearance went to the landlords or the landowners or the properties to clear the dwellings without necessarily trickling down to anyone who may have actually needed it. You get your slum clearance act coming in towards the end of the 19th century but slum clearance
00:58:53
Speaker
is very much something that continues into the 20th century and even probably post-World War II in some areas.
Urban Development and Slum Clearance in Sheffield
00:59:00
Speaker
It was a very slow process. It wasn't like this happened within 10 years or so.
00:59:07
Speaker
I think it would almost be described as social cleansing if it was done today. Because you're effectively dislocating populations. This is kind of an example of that in this picture here. This is a picture of the Radford Street site, which is just a five minute walk uphill from the Doncaster Street cementation furnace.
00:59:34
Speaker
It's quite an open area when you look at it. We know again from the historic maps where the housing did exist so that's obviously where we look for housing and you can see there's a fence line that depicts them basically the modern street level.
00:59:51
Speaker
So again, you lost about 50, 60 centimetres of the site right at the edge, and then it gets worse to further into site you go. There's enough of it intact to see the row of cellars running up the side of the street there. It looks like this was kind of developed in a speculative sense. The road up the right hand side was laid out first, which was a main turnpike road.
01:00:16
Speaker
civic money was made available for a few access points, but after that it was essentially portioned off and given over to speculative builders. Build what you can, get who you can to live in it and see if you make any money off of it. To that end it does seem like this structure here, which unfortunately you can't see a great deal of, was the earliest one built.
01:00:38
Speaker
And then we suspect that part as well, because it's a different size to the rest of the structures. And then you get effectively a terrace of structures going up there. Again, pretty well constructed, it needs to be said. And actually, the size of these ones isn't too bad compared to a lot of them.
01:00:58
Speaker
As you get further away from this primary construction of these areas, it seems that they cheaped out and went for smaller and smaller houses. It's where you start getting back to backs being built as well over what is over behind the spoil heap there.
01:01:13
Speaker
the later, the worse, it seems, probably reflecting the increasing demand for housing. But again, with the point of clearing these slums, it wasn't that they were cleared
01:01:28
Speaker
demolished and then radically improved. They were cleared, demolished, and then this site was turned over to a completely different style of use. It became essentially light industrial plots after that, most likely in response to the nucleus of Demar created around Doncaster's. But it becomes more and more an exclusively industrial area from the late 19th century onwards, just to throw in a bit of orientation for the sake of it as well. This building you can see behind it here, this range,
01:01:58
Speaker
is on Upper Allen Street. That is part, anyway, of the Stevenson Blake type foundry, which was, again, it's one of those things I mentioned because I never knew about it until I actually went to dig there. It is literally where they made Ned typefaces, something that you don't think of as being present in Sheffield, but of course there's so many different industries around other industries.
01:02:25
Speaker
you get these things developing and that was basically a world famous operation. Weirdly, the University of Sheffield ended up owning the copyright on one of the fonts. I don't know how that happened but that is what happened.
01:02:41
Speaker
You can see the lie of the land behind it as well. It's a fairly good shot for indicating that. You've got, I think, Edward Street flats up at the back there, so you've got a solid street running up there. Broad Lane is essentially over the hill, but this is looking uphill to the Crofts, the area known as the Crofts, which I'll show you a map of in a minute.
01:03:05
Speaker
When I was working on the site in the background, it was known that it was still not working factory at the time, but it had been up until recently. There was a great deal of cynicism from a lot of the building contractors saying that, what's the point in redeveloping this site? What's the point in putting these apartments in? No one's ever going to want to live around here. It was the feeling at the time. For better or worse, just look at it now. You can't
01:03:35
Speaker
You can't look anywhere in this part of town without seeing pretty new blocks of flats that have gone up all around the place. There's some new ones going there. And of course, you know, that's partly my fault. We facilitate this development by clearing the sites.
01:03:52
Speaker
But yeah, the real point of this is you get to see the spatial layout and the distribution of these things, which doesn't really fit with I think what some of us may think of when we hear the term slums. Fairly available housing is what it was. People weren't attracted to the city because of things like this. It became where they ended up living
01:04:18
Speaker
as much because of the push factors forcing them out of the countryside. The big transhumans that's going on around about the time all this development is happening is, of course, the shift from
01:04:33
Speaker
from rural to urban settings, for better or for worse. So this is, just briefly now, this is the Crofts. This is a little plan that I shamelessly stole from someone else's presentation. It's Tenter Street or West Bar Green down at the bottom with an intricate series of later land parcels coming off at the top. And that's actually Upper Allen Street at the top there.
01:05:00
Speaker
It's one of those areas that is fascinating archaeologically because there's such a density of a mixture of housing and workshops. It's not exclusively one or the other. Early industrial Sheffield is not segregated in that way. You've got very small scale businesses.
01:05:20
Speaker
operating basically out of people's houses. Little messes did that, people owned their means of production in various ways. So yeah, again, this is the contrast. We look at, are they rotten filthy slums or are they innovative city living? And it's an interesting area to look at because it's just outside the medieval core of the city, which is basically here. Things start getting interesting and spreading out that way.
01:05:45
Speaker
This is what it looked like. Again, not actually much until you start putting the maps together and trying to assess what you found. You get trace evidence of lots of things. This is as near to the hilltop as you can get for that part of town.
Material Culture and Historical Maps
01:06:03
Speaker
Various pits, postholes, the anvil is pushing it. We didn't actually found an anvil. We think we found where an anvil was situated.
01:06:10
Speaker
But you still get traces of the material culture in areas like that, often better preserved than down the hill at Hoyle Street. Really nice little bits of slipwear. Not common in Sheffield at all. You know that you're getting somewhere interesting when you find the slipwear and appropriate age clay pipe.
01:06:29
Speaker
And this is just a bit of a contrast between what you can see in the ground and the relation to how that looks on the historic map. So as I said, these are courts here, lots of court systems, a few bits of back-to-back housing. You can see, I think that just says court number two down there or something like that. So a massive intricate density of people living their lives, going about things in the best way that they can and leaving a few scant traces of what they do.
Conclusion and Listener Engagement
01:06:59
Speaker
And I'm going to leave that up, but that is basically the end of that talk. So thank you very much for listening. Thank you for listening to Archaeology in Ale. For more information about our podcast and our guest speaker, please visit our page on the Archaeology Podcast Network or check the show notes which are attached to this episode. You can get in touch with us at Archaeology in the City on Facebook, WordPress, Instagram, or Twitter. If you have any questions or comments, we'd love to hear from you.
01:07:26
Speaker
Next month, archaeology and ale will be hosting David Templeman from Friends of Sheffield Manor Lodge, speaking on an exploration of Sheffield's ancient village suburbs. See you next time.
01:07:58
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV Traveling America, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, in the Archaeology Podcast Network. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com.