Tramlines 2009 was not like most music festivals. There was no main stage, no camping, no wristbands, no VIP area. There were instead dozens of Sheffield pubs, clubs, cafes, and open spaces hosting hundreds of acts over a single July weekend, with free access to most events and a programming ethos that reflected the full range of Sheffield’s musical culture rather than a curated selection of broadly appealing names. It was the city as venue. It was very Sheffield.

The concept came from a group of Sheffield promoters and music industry people who wanted to create something for the city that didn’t require the city to suspend its normal functioning. Tramlines took its name from the tram network that connected Sheffield’s neighbourhoods – the idea that you could follow the music across the city, jumping on and off the Supertram between venues, experiencing Sheffield’s musical geography as a continuous cultural landscape. In practice it worked better than it had any right to – the city’s size was exactly right for the format, large enough to sustain multiple simultaneous music scenes but small enough that the distances were manageable.

The early years established a character that stuck. Tramlines was not Glastonbury. It wasn’t Reading. It wasn’t trying to be the biggest festival in Britain. It was trying to be the best Sheffield cultural event in July, which was a more achievable ambition and produced something more genuine. The lineups included Sheffield artists – this was a structural commitment, not a tokenistic local slot – alongside national and international acts. The programming took risks that commercial festivals couldn’t afford to take.

The city-wide model began to strain under success. As Tramlines grew in attendance, the logistics of managing thousands of people across dozens of venues in a functioning city became more complex. The move to Hillsborough Park, which happened in stages across the early 2010s, was both a practical necessity and a genuine loss. The park concentrated what had been distributed. The festival became more legible – more recognisably a festival – but some of the anarchic city-wide quality disappeared in the process.

What remained was a festival with Sheffield’s personality intact: musically serious, unpretentious, cheaper than its equivalents, and embedded in a city that takes its music culture as a point of pride rather than a lifestyle accessory. The Hillsborough Park version of Tramlines has headlined acts of genuine international significance. The camping is competent. The food is the quality you’d expect from a Sheffield street food ecosystem that’s better than most cities’ permanent restaurants.

Sheffield’s music history – the Leadmill, Pulp, the Human League, the Monkeys – gives Tramlines a context that most city festivals lack. When you’re standing in Hillsborough Park watching a band play, you’re standing in a city that has been producing important music for fifty years. That’s not a marketing line. That’s the air the festival breathes.