I was walking in Sheffield again. It’s a good place to walk. It has seven hills (no, not much like Rome), but they do keep you fit, if they don’t kill you.
That isn’t me in the photograph above, in fact I don’t know who it is. I took the picture years ago while leaning out of the window of one of these towers, where a friend lived at the time.
Sheffield has always had ‘interesting’ architecture, little of it truly great, and very little of it genuinely Brutalist. There’s Park Hill of course, now desired by hipsters,
and there used to be the terrifying, now demolished, Kelvin flats,
But those towers always had a certain brut charm about them. I know they weren’t very popular in their day, and my friend was only living there because she was working for the council and they gave her the flat because it was hard to let. But times change.
Today there’s all kinds of zesty new architecture all over the city, a great many towers, and as far as I can tell as an outsider, these aren’t very well loved either.
So I was wandering around looking at all the new, computer-generated, Lego buildings, and suddenly there they were – those very towers – which have been given cladding to hide their brutish exteriors.
Purists would have sneered at this under any circumstances but I don’t think we quite feel the same way about cladding as we used to.
I also went to look at my parents’ old house: they died a long time ago. It didn’t appear to have changed a bit, which was in some ways the most surprising thing of all.
