Changing Places: An Insight into Philadelphia Greenspace and Kelvin Flats with Diane Leek

There is an area of parkland behind the Upperthorpe library called Philadelphia Greenspace; here the trees and bushes act as a shield from the adjacent Penistone Road. It is a place where you can hear the wind in the leaves, song birds calling, where you can hold a conversation in spacious surroundings. But it hasn’t always been this way.

If you were to have walked along this stretch of Penistone Road between 1967 and 1993, your experience would have been altogether different. To one side of you would be a monstrous block of flats, much like Park Hill above the Sheffield railway station. These were the Kelvin flats, which formed part of a housing solution during the slum clearances of the late sixties. The program of clearance, demolition and resettlement swept across the upper Don Valley, from the Parkwood estate up into parts of Walkley. You can find more information on the Walkley slum clearances from the Walkley History Project's website, which you can find here.

The architectural style of Kelvin Flats was unflinchingly modernist. The building was so abstract that, compared to its surroundings, it could have been brought in from outer space. And while this stretch of the Don Valley has a heritage of large stand-alone buildings (the Infirmary, Hillsborough Barracks, the Hillsborough Library building), the Kelvin Flats were unprecedented in their visual brutality.

When communities were first re-housed into the flats, the response was surprisingly favourable. Residents who had lived in old terraced housing now lived in new clean properties which were easy to heat and had mod-cons such as inside toilets. Yet the benefits associated with Kelvin soon became overshadowed; with antisocial behaviour rising and a lack of general maintenance and upkeep, the flats were demolished in 1993 - only twenty-six years after they were built.

Diane Leek, a former Lord Mayor of Sheffield, was once a Kelvin resident. Diane was kind enough to agree to meet me, for which I am very grateful. The meeting took place in the conservatory of the Hillsborough Hotel, a stone's throw from the Philadelphia Greenspace. We sat in view of Parkwood Springs, beside a large contemporary building that until recently had housed Mecca Bingo. Had Kelvin Flats still been standing, we would have been sitting in their shadow.

Diane talked about her experience of Kelvin Flats, along with other histories of the upper Don Valley. She was not only incredibly knowledgeable, but also a well known and friendly face in the area, greeting a number of passers by in the short time that I spent with her.

You can listen to some of Diane's reflections on Kelvin Flats and the Upper Don Valley here:





Kelvin Flats
“I could be bounded in a nutshell

and count myself a king of infinite space,

were it not I have bad dreams.”
I confuse the ghosts of Kelvin Flats
with pigeon lofts at Cuthbert Bank.
Both nests of hair or feathers, the fall
and rise of breathing, breast to breast.
Which one meant uplift, flight?
The work of soft rot, Jew’s Ear, water
has opened in this wooden box
a space for ladders of sunlight,
a gradient of leaves and hail.
Before no room for attic or cellar,
wind up cars, clockwork figures,
a diagram of streets behind glass
clouded by the body’s heat.
It took the mind to part the walls,
shift the roof to let in the night,
make a hole to funnel fire,
put a running stream below.
John Barron
Rubbish bags
Rotting concrete, blackened cavities
in rows waiting to be filled.
Milk floats hum along the landings.
No ball games.
Harsh brutalist time.
Steps when the lifts break down.
Push chairs bump, walking sticks tap,
stop to get their breaths back.
Swing balls wreck homes,
stage sets open up:
wall papered living rooms
and lavatories hang by a thread.
Then its dust and rehousing.
Forget the suicides,
their lives have umravelled
like burst rubbish bags.
Marion New

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