Sheffield Steel: The Little Mesters and What Remains

The structure of Sheffield’s cutlery industry was unlike the factory system that characterised most Victorian manufacturing. Rather than large integrated works employing hundreds of workers in a single building, the Sheffield trade was organised around the Little Mesters: self-employed craftsmen who rented space in shared workshop buildings called cutlers’ wheels, owned their own tools and equipment, and worked to order for merchant manufacturers who provided the raw materials and found the customers. A single knife might pass through the hands of a forger, a grinder, a cutler, a hafter, and a finisher – each a separate Little Mester, each paid by the piece.

The system produced extraordinary quality and extraordinary precarity in roughly equal measure. The craftsmen were highly skilled and poorly paid. They worked in conditions that were genuinely dangerous – grinding wheels could and did shatter; the dust from dry grinding caused grinders’ asthma, a progressive lung disease that killed men in their forties. The occupational health history of the Sheffield cutlery trade is one of the darker chapters in British industrial history. The men who made the best knives in the world died young making them.

The physical geography of the Sheffield cutlery trade is concentrated in the area south of the city centre around Arundel Street, Solly Street, and the surrounding streets. The workshops – multi-storey brick buildings with large windows to maximise light for close work – survive in considerable numbers, more than in any comparable industrial district in Britain. Many are listed. The Kelham Island Museum, which houses what is probably the most complete collection of Sheffield industrial equipment in existence, tells the story through the machines themselves: the grinding hulls, the drop stamps, the buffing wheels.

Portland Works on Randall Street is the last remaining example of a functioning cutlery manufacturing works in the original sense. It was saved from demolition by a community buyout in 2012 and is now cooperatively owned, with a mix of craftspeople, artists, and small businesses occupying the workshops that once housed Little Mesters. Some of those businesses are cutlery businesses. The grinders are still there, still making knives, in a building that has been making knives since the 1870s.

The large-scale steel industry that surrounded and dwarfed the cutlery trade is largely gone. The Don Valley east of the city centre – once the most intense concentration of steel production in the world – was cleared through the 1980s and 1990s. The Meadowhall shopping centre stands on a former steelworks site. The Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre at Catcliffe, where Boeing and Rolls-Royce have research operations, represents a different kind of metal working – high technology, low employment relative to the scale of capital – on the land where the heavy industry once stood.

The cutlery trade survives in reduced form. The premium end of the market – the knives that cost what knives cost when made properly in Sheffield by people who know what they are doing – is healthy. The heritage connection is a commercial asset as much as a cultural one. Sheffield knives carry a provenance that no other city’s cutlery can replicate. The Little Mesters are not gone. They are fewer, smaller, and working in a market they never anticipated, but the craft is continuous.