South Yorkshire Group Events

UPCOMING EVENTS

Disclaimer: You participate in events at your own risk and neither the Society nor its officers or servants accepts any liability of any kind whatsoever, howsoever arising.

The Victorian Society reserves the right to cancel, alter or postpone events if necessary.

South Yorkshire Summer Programme of Walks & Visits 2024;

Advanced booking of activities through Eventbrite, especially where places are limited,Places can also be booked through our general email address below.

Start times and meeting places are as shown in each events details.

Entrance is open to members & non-members and costs £5.
Enquiries to [email protected]

What to bring on a guided walk:

You should bring a cold drink and perhaps a snack. If it is warm or sunny, we would suggest that you carry extra water and some sun cream. A brimmed hat is very handy too. Remember the British summer can be inclement so think about bringing a waterproof and umbrella in case it rains and something warm to put on in case the temperature suddenly drops.

Saturday 15th June 2024 2.00pm: History of the First St John’s Church in Ranmoor. A Talk by Mary Grover followed by a Guided Tour. - Surprisingly little is known about the two wealthy men who funded the elegant Victorian Gothic church of St John's Ranmoor: James William Harrison, the cutler and scissor-maker who donated the land for the church and John Newton Mappin, the successful Rotherham brewer who funded its construction. Both men died childless and left few records of their activities. The masons, carpenters and other artisans who actually built the church left even fewer traces. This talk will focus on the hunt for relevant archives in the hope that other historians in this area may be able to follow in Mary’s steps and avoid her missteps.

This event is part of the Scissors Paper Stone community project exploring the origins of St John’s Church in Ranmoor: the people who built it, the community which founded it and the people it served. Meet in St John’s Church, Ranmoor Park Road, Sheffield S10 3GX

The talk and tour will be followed by refreshments at 4.00pm. You are welcome to stay for an exhibition of paintings by our Victorian Society Secretary, Margaret Bennett. Margaret will introduce the exhibition at 5.30pm.
At 6.00pm there is a concert by the choirs of St John’s celebrating the builders of the church.

Dr. Mary Grover founded Reading Sheffield. This group explores the reading habits of Sheffielders in the last three hundred years. Her book about the oral histories the group, gathered from readers growing up in Sheffield in the first half of the twentieth century, is called Steel City Readers (Liverpool University Press 2023). Her previous books, while at Sheffield Hallam University, concerned the development of reading tastes in the early twentieth century, in particular the cultural snobbery surrounding the emergence of a new reading public in the 1930s and 1940s. Her present community history project, Scissors Paper Stone, founded in 2023, is helping to bring together historians, artists, dramatists and musicians to explore the history of St John’s and its role in the community.

Book Here or through our email [email protected]

Saturday 20th July 2024 2.30pm: A Walking Tour of City Road Cemetery, Sheffield with Graham Hague. - Meet at the main entrance to City Road Cemetery near Spring Lane tram stop. You can take the 120 bus from the city to Halfway or to Crystal Peaks. The walk will take about 2 hours. It starts with a short climb from the gatehouse to the crematorium and is then mainly flat. The City Road Cemetery was laid out on land purchased in 1878, by the Sheffield Burials Board from the Duke of Norfolk, the country’s premier Catholic peer and a major landowner (as the Norfolk family remains) in Sheffield. M E Hadfield and Sons designed the structures in the Cemetery – Church of England and Nonconformist chapels, gateways, lodges and housing for officials, and later the crematorium – all in late Perpendicular style and using local stone.

We will view St Michael’s Roman Catholic Cemetery chapel which Valerie Bayliss has nominated for The Victorian Society’s Top Ten Endangered Buildings list. Notwithstanding its denomination, it has never belonged to the RC church, being in the ownership and care of Sheffield City Council. Unfortunately the chapel is not safe to enter.

Amongst all the memorials in this cemetery, we will see the Belgian War Memorial and the Sheffield Blitz Memorial garden. If people want to look at another example of Charles Hadfield’s work, we can go past Manor Lodge school on the way back to City Road.

Book Here or through our email [email protected]

14/05/2024