Inner City Round Run
Our first guest post by runner and local podcaster Loz Harvey
Urban travel is much more than getting from A to B as quickly as possible. In cities around the world, since the 1950s, artists and writers have considered the idea of Psychogeography, or how we think about our city as we travel around.
Many liked the 19th century French notion of the flâneur, an aimless wanderer taking strolls to nowhere in particular to simply experience a city by being part of it.
There’s no better Sheffield flâneur than Loz Harvey, a writer, podcaster and runner who explores his adopted city in all kinds of ways that people born here may not have considered. You can find his work under the Looking Up Sheffield title, his writing is here and podcasts here.
He recommends the 7 Hills of Sheffield run, for example, rumoured to have been started by the Dark Peak Fell Runners. So that'll be gruelling and long, you might think. Not necessarily. The hills in question are the city’s William Hill bookmakers, and the night run round them all can be done in less than an hour.
Loz was drawn to Terry Howard’s Inner City Round Walk for obvious reasons, as although Terry is best known for many years of campaigning for access to the moorland and countryside on our borders, he also believes there’s much to see and learn down pretty much every urban street. The crozzle from cementation furnaces in city gennels, for example, or broken grindstones used as wall cappers.
“Each and every unplanned walk can develop into a mini expedition,” Terry said to me about his pandemic lockdown exercise.
So here’s Loz’s take on Terry’s walk. We’ll all find different things on the Inner City Round Walk, have different views and impressions and experiences. But if you’re a Steel City flâneur, that’s the point.
(And if you’re new here, please subscribe to get more of this kind of thing. It’s free for a trial for a few weeks, and if you read here regularly, I’d appreciate a morsel of your disposable income to help pay the bills. Thanks!)
“Like Terry Howard, I think you can find a great narrative simply by stepping outside your front door,” Loz tells me.
“When I set up the Looking up Sheffield podcast, it was very much to celebrate and experience the things near to our city centre, rather than that advertising you sometimes see about the things Sheffield is ‘close to,’ like only being two hours from London by train.
“Yes, what a great thing it is to have the Peak District on our doorstep, but rather than Sheffield's close reach to other places, I think there’s lots to celebrate in our urban environment. Terry Howard is a great roamer and advocate for journeys out there but like him, I quite like the idea of journeys in there, within the city, as well.
“Ultimately the Inner City Run takes you to places you otherwise might not visit, it traces a fantastic trail passing great industrialists, our parks and our history, and it’s all living and breathing, and overgrown and decrepit.” Here’s Loz’s running commentary:
Forget quilling or sculpting in butter, it’s the simple pleasure of running that is the new artform.
I’m paraphrasing Terry Howard, Sheffield’s great right to roam champion, and one of the surest pillars holding up the People’s Republic of South Yorkshire. In his introduction to the republished (by the lush Peakrill Press) Inner City Round Walk Of Sheffield, Terry sets out the assault on your senses that simply walking, or by extension, running, can bring.
Even better when his inner city walk takes in some of the forgotten, haunted, industrial corners of our fine city.
Armed with a copy of Inner City, my mate Adam and I resolve to tackle this run early one Sunday morning, painting on Strava the streets trod by Terry and searching for troubled tales of sprites and convicts, gennels of misfortune and English industrial estates. Here’s what we found.
Sheffield Inner City Walk is a delight of a route, but perhaps not for the fainthearted. Distinguished over its 12 (we managed 14) miles by its many hills, and pockmarked by nettles, industrial estates, paths never-imagined and unusual places like Osgathorpe, Crabtree and Grimesthorpe, it traces Sheffield’s industrial heft over the past 200 years.
We start at the Blake Hotel in Walkley, long before it opens (natch) and head towards Kelham. But we eschew the 21st century revamped version of Kelham Island for a glance at George Barnsley & Son, still looking (with a little imagination) as it did in its toolmakers’ heyday and resisting, for now, redevelopment for the VORV (Vegetarian or Vegan) crowd.
This is when it becomes clear that we won’t be following a tried and tested route. We head up towards Parkwood Springs, but take an unmarked right hand turn that brings Burngreave into focus and helps to make lighter work of the Rutland Road climb.
We pass the toll house on Barnsley Road from where prisoners would be marched on foot all the way to Wakefield Jail (and after that climb from Neepsend I knew how they felt), and on to Roe Lane and Crabtree Woods, ancient woodland if ever I saw it.
From here, it’s a city painter’s dream as new streets come into sharp focus.
Osgathorpe sees a couple of youngsters gazing across one of the walk’s many striking vistas over the city (in fact the way the Sheffield skyline pivots and changes as the run goes on must be one of its highlights).
In Grimesthorpe, we see the fantastic allotments fighting for space amidst the old industrial units (Adam gets music by The Fall in his head, I plump for the more obscure English Industrial Estate by the Shy Tots), and we drop down for a view of the Corner Pin, now separated from buildings on all sides and a last remaining throwback to the time when this hive of industry had a pub on every corner.
This area also provides a chance to curse Terry for his unusual choices of cut-throughs: impenetrable nettles and 10 feet of Japanese Knotweed make the sketchier parts of the Sheffield Round Relay ultramarathon around the city boundary seem like a parkrun.
(Update from Terry: he knows about the jungle below, and has been asking the council and Amey to do something about this right of way for some months, he says. As it stands, Terry’s understanding is that Amey think the council’s Public Rights of Way department are responsible, whereas the council think otherwise. Meanwhile, although no tumbleweed is involved, the weeds continue to grow.)
Crossing the Parkway and down to Corker Bottoms, the route emerges at the bottom of Wybourn and the Manor, via some unheralded paths and crossings, to the Manor Lodge where Mary Queen of Scots bathed in wine in captivity, and Springheeled Jack skipped about as only sprites can, on Sky Edge and across the city to Arbourthorne.
(Local writer and journalist David Clarke’s account of Spring Heeled Jack can be found as a pdf download here, and his book Scared to Death: And Other Ghost Stories from Victorian Sheffield on several local mysteries is here. )
Art can come in many forms of course, but it is a challenging find in parts of Arbourthorne, complete with its scrawled Eric Bristow tributes and large open spaces.
I’m reminded that Andy Cropper, one of Sheffield’s finest artists, is a keen exponent of Terry and has written the introduction to the latest version of the walk booklet. Turns out we’re not so much on a run, but plotting canvases in our heads of urban planning and escape.
From S4, we moved on to more familiar ground, but not, perhaps, as we’ve experienced it on countless runs in the past. We cut past the Meers Brook, the old boundary between Yorkshire and Derbyshire, and Cat Lane, stopping for a look at the Bishop’s House and a more familiar view of the city before making our way up to Cherry Tree Lane and its famous residents, and Nether Edge.
I’d never dreamed of going through the Narrow Walk gennel that separates Crookesmoor Road from Northumberland Road, nor knew that it once skirted the edge of the Dam of Misfortune. (A name quite appropriate when the University had to rebuild its nearby new journalism HQ recently.)
From there, it’s a short yomp back to the Blake (which still isn’t open, natch again). We resolve to come back and maybe, just maybe, stop at a few pubs on route next time.
Reading Terry Howard’s prequel to the latest edition of his book (seek out Peakrill Press on X for more info on where to get hold of one), I’m struck by how much the city changes from day to day, and how much remains.
A different day and time would bring a different experience. This run, or walk, offers a space to dream, a fresh take on familiar streets. It offers possibilities and pitfalls, history and heart. Looks like it really is art in motion.
I strongly suggest you get hold of Terry’s booklet, but if you do want to run the route, I’ve attempted to snaffle Loz and Adam’s expedition as a Strava route. And here’s a screen grab from Strava which might indicate something of what you might be facing. Go explore.
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Thanks for a great read. Just purchased the book to give it a go myself 👍🏻.