Just before the light goes out in the lounge, I look around me and see some kind of cross-section of the modern Sheffield in front of me: a retired workers, young academics, musicians and ordinary people in the middle age.
Rarely has a theatre had an audience so motivated to process their collective history that when the Crucible Theater put up the musical ‘ Standing at the sky’s edge”. When they are now going to tell the story of the residential area of Park Hill Estate, they have a rich material to draw from, and in addition a fine låtskatt created by one of the city’s great sons, the artist Richard Hawley.
with the train to Sheffield’s Park Hill, the first thing you see. The large residential area that climbs up the hill behind the train station was built in the late 50’s and replaced a dreadful victorian slum where generations of stålstadens poorest of the poor workers lived.
times; the war was over, and a modern England would be built. Sheffield progressive management let two young architects – hard influenced by Le Corbusier’s brutalistiska apartment complex in Marseille – draw the future utopistiska working in the middle of the city. The result was regarded by his contemporaries as very successful, the queen inaugurated and urban planners from all over Europe came to gaze upon the continent’s largest structure.
Everything went very thoroughly into, the sociologists gave the advice, the old town’s cobblestone recycled into new pathways for the recognition, former neighbors, were placed close to each other in the big loftgångshusen and via the road in the sky – as it came to be called – were building together and made it possible for both the little milk truck for people to move through the area. Set along the alleys of a winding medieval city.
the Sociologists had emphasised the human need to gossip. The hard-pressed arbetarfamiljerna rejoiced also for basic things like running cold and hot water, seal the window and well planned kitchen. And down in the valley went the industries are still booming; the whole world wanted to have Sheffield’s famous scissors, cutlery and steel products.
Park Hill Estate was built in the 50’s. Photo: Po Tidholm
Few british towns tells the story of industry, of the working class and the social cohesion, collapse in such dramatic twists and turns as the Sheffield. And yet, the city has not improved, rather, is barely halfway through a transformation from industrial centre to knowledge-based economy.
the New skyscrapers coexist with abandoned industrial properties and poorly maintained residential area. But the university has grown and the city is dominated by lecture rooms, cafes and student accommodation. Foreign students – mainly from China – has become a major source of revenue, a net gain for the city at a billion a year.
Park Hill is perhaps the ultimate symbol of the city’s post-industrial ambitions. After years of decay and lack of maintenance left it the houses to the real Urban Splash, which in 2007 completed a period renovation of a part of the area. With some caution, yet, Park Hill, since 1998 a national historic monument of the highest class.
”Standing at the sky’s edge” takes place in the same apartment, but in three distinct phases of Park Hills history. There are arbetarparet who get their first real apartment in new settlement, the migrants who are fleeing an african civil war during the 80’s and move into a then already förslummat utopia and, finally, a single career from London, who in the present day buy the apartment which has now become an expensive, minimalist condominium.
politics: the record, Thatcher, strikes, unemployment, Brexit. Inside the walls are born the child, the sups and the fighting, the loved and left – and sung. Richard Hawley, during the periods a member of the Sheffieldgruppen Pulp but above all one of our time’s best crooners, has contributed some of their finest songs to the musical.
They slide nicely into the story because they in many cases already is about the city’s locations and moods. And they work surprisingly well even when performed by trained musikalröster. The orchestra, which sits one floor up in the copy of the Park Hill, that towers up in the corner of the stage, is extremely responsive and dynamic.
But it is a very nice performance. It embodies, however, problematizes not the political dimension of the Park Hills story. The modern history contends that the areas in which these became a slum for the residents to lose grip, or alternatively, to brutalismens architecture in itself corrupt man.
In fact, reflected in Park Hills decay of the british society change. From a dream of more equality, social inclusion and security, to the shattered trade unions, the London-domination and towards restraint in economic policy. Park Hill was transformed from the ideal society to the slum for thirty years, and the workers got the blame.
r on the hill is a different kind of utopia, more in the style of New Labour’s 90-talsmotto: ”We are all middle class now”. Signs around the Park Hill advertise vacant apartments to a entry price of just over a million.
In the courtyard there is a kindergarten, an art gallery, planted the japanese grass and the nordic trendy björksnår. On the lower bottom rent start-up companies and in the local restaurant you can eat fresh hummusrätter while looking at an exhibition of Bill stephenson’s photo documentation of the inhabitants of the house from the 80’s slumperiod.
the irony in this context is to be understood that such a gentrifieringsprocess need their storytelling, and that Urban Splash is very aware parasitizing the area’s authenticity. They have decorated the glass surfaces and facades with The text ”I love you Will u marry me” – a piece of the primitive 80-talsklotter on one of the bridges in the sky.
the Object of the wooing, died penniless in cancer and the man are long homeless and an alcoholic. He has asked for an apartment as a replacement for its slogan, but was rejected. People that he is not welcome.
the Text, in the form of a neon sign, hovering also over the stage at the Crucible Theater, and in many ways becomes the musical part of the re-brandingen of the property. It is logical that the musical storyteller, who ties the scenes together, doing the role of a sales representative at Urban Splash.
Read more texts by Po Tidholm, for example, if Bruce Springsteen ensamföreställning on Broadway.