There is a lot to love about Sheffield as a university town. There are vibrant pockets of collective student identity, whether that’s in Endcliffe or Crookes or Ecclesall or even Ranmoor, at a push. It’s managed to avoid becoming one of those hellish campus universities where you live in a sort of airport but without any planes to escape on, incarcerated in student accommodation that makes Chernobyl look upmarket, and separated from the nearest bit of town with a social pulse by eight industrial estates. Sheffield’s student milieus feel autonomous, but are still embedded in the city.
Compared to the rest of the country, it’s cheap to go out. Where Manchester might rip you off, London straight up bankrupt you, or Birmingham make you want to cry for other reasons, in Sheffield, fun comes at a more reasonable premium. It’s still too much, let’s be clear – but against the backdrop of a nation that is well and truly on its arse, going to the pub is easier to justify than elsewhere.
Incidentally, what great pubs. Sheffield’s students are blessed with pubs that are varied and spirited and plentiful. Lots stay open late. Most don’t take the piss with their prices. And several are happy to moonlight as venues for the kind of scene which, before I arrived, I thought was almost the whole point of university.
To clarify, this is a commentary on the scene, rather than an announcement that everyone who isn’t jamming out in their mate’s garage twice weekly is wasting three years of their life. I’m not in one, to my regret. But there’s a colourful landscape of which I’m sure we’ve all been a part at some point, whether or not you’re a fresh-faced guitarist onstage.
There’s a distinctive hum that only this kind of gig gives off, and which you can feel from a long way away; the magnetic buzz of constant conversation and infectious laughter and raucous swearing and cheerful argument. It’s the familiar soundtrack of youth, optimism and people whom the world hasn’t yet managed to get down, buoyed by the booze and the crowds of friendly faces, joining suspiciously long queues for the toilet, framed by a haze of fag smoke and harsh, bright lights against dark, blurred evenings. It’s a great laugh, but it’s also important.
These are scenes that are at the heart of Britain’s civil society, and more specifically, its music. When you’re at a gig like this, in a venue of the sort Sheffield is full, you’re the backbone of where music comes from in this country – and what it’s for.
All of this theoretically makes Sheffield a really encouraging place to be in a student band or DJ. Its student population is enabled rather than constrained, the existing music culture – both historically and today – is well-founded, and locales that host all this musical enterprise are valiantly struggling on. They include rave clubs like Forge and Dryad Works, pub venues like Shakespeare’s or the ever-reliable Washington, pub/clubs like Yellow Arch, Haggler’s Corner, Sidney&Matilda, or Factory Floor in Kelham, or indeed the Grapes, where the Arctic Monkeys played their first ever gig.
All of the above deserve their own attention; not only because they put on great nights and symbiotically encourage student musicians, but also because of the existential threat facing many places like them.
Grassroots music venues, pubs and clubs have been falling like flies nationwide, a depressing trend that has afflicted pretty much every town in the UK. Sheffield’s casualties include some old and famous, as well as new and less established names. The Leadmill joins Hopeworks, the Dorothy Pax, the Sportsman, the New Inn Gleadless and the Berlin Calling on the recent nightlife cenotaph, with many more sure to follow if the pressure of fiscal and socioeconomic trouble doesn’t relent soon.
It’s a trajectory that hasn’t escaped the attention of national media. The BBC were filming at Hopeworks’ last official event as part of a documentary which aired on BBC 3. Whilst she was interviewing the Hopeworks faithful, one of the correspondents observed to me that ‘people just aren’t really spending on pubs and clubs as much anymore’, as she shrugged in resignation. It was as unhelpful as it is true.
An entire subsection of British society is being undermined, by forces both inevitable and otherwise. Fundamentally, these debates come and go with the fluctuations of the economy which are threatening far more than just our pubs.
The government could probably do more to protect Sheffield’s scene. But we all do a lot of navel-gazing about what the government should or shouldn’t be doing for us, very little of which is practically useful. In the here and now, Sheffield’s students are fortunate to exist in a relatively affordable and musical city. Sheffield’s venues are probably quite fortunate to exist in a city energised by a local and vibrant student population. As long as there are decks to be spun, songs to be written, cigarettes to be lit and pints to be sunk in this animated city, may that dynamic continue.
