Park Hill: Sheffield’s Most Argued-Over Building

Park Hill was designed by Jack Lynn and Ivor Smith and built between 1957 and 1961. It replaced a network of terraced slum housing on the hillside – the Park district – that had been one of Sheffield’s most densely populated working-class communities. The architects and the city council believed they were doing something genuinely progressive. The streets in the sky concept – wide deck access walkways wide enough for a milk float to drive along – was designed to recreate the communal life of the terraced street at height. Neighbours would still be neighbours. Community would be preserved in a modern, warm, plumbed building rather than a cold, overcrowded back-to-back.

It worked, up to a point, for a while. The community that moved in from the cleared terraces knew each other and maintained the social networks from the ground-level streets. The design had genuine qualities: the way the building steps down the hillside following the contours, the variety of flat sizes, the integration of social facilities at deck level. The architects were serious about what they were trying to do and not entirely wrong about what they were doing.

By the 1980s, Park Hill had become what critics of high-rise social housing had always predicted it would become: underfunded, undermanaged, and associated in the public mind with deprivation and failure. The original community had dispersed as the city’s population shifted. New tenants arrived without the existing social connections. The maintenance that the complex required was not provided. The lifts broke. The deck access walkways, which were supposed to be streets in the sky, became places where people did not feel safe. Sheffield City Council eventually began decanting residents and discussing options for the future.

The Grade II* listing in 1998 – controversial at the time, opposed by many Sheffield residents who simply wanted the thing demolished – was the intervention that forced a different conversation. You cannot demolish a Grade II* listed building except in the most exceptional circumstances. Park Hill had to have a future. What that future should look like was the question.

Urban Splash, the Manchester-based regeneration developer, took on Phase 1 of the Park Hill refurbishment in 2007. The scheme involved stripping the concrete panels from the facing of the building and replacing them with coloured anodised aluminium cladding – rust, yellow, orange, pink – giving the refurbished sections a distinctive contemporary appearance while retaining the structural frame. The first apartments went on sale to private buyers. This is where the gentrification argument became heated and has remained heated.

The “I love you will u marry me” graffiti on the flank wall facing the station was retained and has become the most photographed element of the building. It was written in the 1970s by Jason Lowe for his girlfriend. She said no. The wall it’s written on is now part of a marketed regeneration project. The gap between what the graffiti represents – ordinary human feeling expressed on a piece of social housing – and what Park Hill is in the process of becoming is the gap that critics of the regeneration point to when they talk about who the scheme is actually for.

The refurbishment continues in phases. The social housing element was always a minority of the total scheme. Park Hill is becoming, in significant part, a private residential development on one of the best sites in Sheffield. Whether this is better than demolition, better than continued dereliction, or simply a different kind of loss from the one that was already happening – that is still, genuinely, not settled.