Sheffield, and Radisson Blu Hotel – Review

By Clare Jenkins, August 2024

According to Marcel Proust, “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”

Thirty-six hours in Sheffield city centre, staying overnight at the newly opened and ideally placed Radisson Blu, showed just how right the great French novelist was. Since the pandemic, my husband (who was born in Sheffield) and I have avoided the area whenever possible, preferring instead to explore the Peak District from our home in the south-west of the city.

When we’ve had to go into town, we’ve been saddened by the closed-down shops, the ‘stack em high, sell ‘em cheap’ replacements, the nail bars, tattoo parlours, vape shops, fast food outlets and ‘entertainment exchanges’. We’ve also been almost deafened by the seemingly endless cacophony of pneumatic drills as builders dig up Fargate’s cobbles to replace them with paving stones.

Sheffield’s Peace Gardens
image: Marketing Sheffield

“Ongoing transformation”

It’s all part of the long-drawn-out and expensive (£480 million to date) regeneration of ‘Steel City’. A regeneration that Professor Vanessa Toulmin, director of city and culture, partnerships and regional engagement at the University of Sheffield, is actively involved in.

When I bumped into her in Orchard Square, she was full of enthusiasm for the quarter’s ongoing transformation. She pointed out The Sheffield Plate food court (including Korean-Japanese fusion, Portuguese and Sri Lankan street food), a stall selling Sheffield-made Bullion craft chocolate, the Printed By Us social enterprise and The Old Shoe (formerly a shoe shop now one of the city’s 60 micro-breweries).

“The city centre is thriving nowadays,” she said, throwing phrases like Grey to Green, Future High Street and Heart of the City at me. “It’s going to be a total transformation. Have you been to Castlegate? There’s going to be a green spine going all along there, from the Riverside to the city centre. With all the money that’s been spent on it, it’s going to be amazing.””

Sheffield Cathedral
image: Marketing Sheffield

“Eccentric exhibits”

Castlegate – the site of the original Sheffield Castle, now lined by cheap shops – is still very much a work-in-progress. Other areas are more obviously attractive: the area in and around the Anglican Cathedral, for instance, with its huge memorials to the Earls of Shrewsbury (including the 6th, husband of Bess of Hardwick and guard of Mary Queen of Scots when she was imprisoned in Sheffield Manor for 14 years), St George’s Chapel of the York and Lancaster regiment, and its plaques to Sheffield’s great and good. Among them are master cutlers, steel manufacturers, surgeons, composer William Sterndale Bennett – ‘an angel musician’, according to Schubert -, and newspaper editor James Montgomery, who was also an anti-slavery campaigner and prolific hymn-writer. The oldest building in Sheffield still in daily use, the cathedral offers regular concerts, a browsable shop, a good café and – in decent weather – deckchairs outside on the green.

Then there’s Norfolk Row, home to the Gothic revival St Marie’s RC Cathedral, with its calm ‘far from the madding crowd’ air, diverse congregation and chapel dedicated to Polish servicemen who died in the 2nd World War. Neighbouring Tudor Square houses Sheffield’s two renowned theatres – the Crucible and the Lyceum – as well as both the Graves and Millennium art galleries.

In the Millennium Gallery, the Ruskin Collection celebrates – to quote Victorian artist and critic John Ruskin – “everything that is lovely in the life of Nature and heroic in the life of Men”.

The adjoining Metalwork Gallery and its current exhibition, Show Your Metal, focus on the heroic in their eclectic displays of Sheffield’s role (past and present) in cutlery and steelmaking. More eccentric exhibits include a 1960s steel dress, a bayonet blade and helmet, an egg topper (scissors for taking the tops of boiled eggs – doesn’t everyone own one?), turtle-shaped soup tureen, copper buttons and door handles.

Shrewbury Monument in Sheffield Cathedral
image: Stephen McClarence

“Creative independent businesses”

Not far away is the Cambridge Street Collective, touted as Europe’s largest purpose-built food hall. Over 20 eateries offer a range of dishes, including from Palestine, Vietnam, Greece, Nepal, Eritrea and Ethiopia, reflecting some of the diversity of the UK’s first City of Sanctuary.

Over coffee in Orchard Square, we read the mural Sonnet for Sheffield by local poet laureate Warda Yassin, with its lines: ‘This city is an open-palmed sanctuary, a realm for wayfarers with henna-stained fingers… She murmurs an abundance of languages…”

“We counted 25 different nationalities at Mass one Sunday,” said Fr Grant Naylor, priest in charge of St Matthew’s Church in Carver Street, another active church, which backs on to both the Collective and Leah’s Yard. The yard’s listed former collection of Little Mesters cutlery workshops is now poised to re-open as a centre for other creative independent businesses, including a craft brewery, podcasting hub and artist Pete McKee’s studio.

“Our parish,” continued Fr Naylor, “stretches from the City Hall war memorial to the ring road and is one of the top ten per cent poorest in the country. We’re open to everybody. So we can have the boss of HSBC sitting next to a homeless person, then someone who was brought up in a terraced house here, alongside students and asylum-seekers.’

Exterior of Radisson Blu, Sheffield

“Radical past”

We saw that diversity later, from the long third-floor terrace bar at the front of the Radisson Blu, a much-needed cosmopolitan addition to the city centre. The stylishly refurbished five-storey, red-brick building previously housed shops below, flats above. It’s directly across from the Victorian Town Hall and the Peace Gardens, where families of many nationalities were sitting outside the restaurants, enjoying ‘Sheffield by the Seaside’, their children sliding down the helter-skelter, circling round on the fairground rides and splashing about in the fountains.

Those fountains are dedicated to Samuel Holberry, the Chartist Leader who died in York Castle in 1842, aged just 28, after being imprisoned there for two years ‘for his part in the Sheffield Rising of 1840’. Sheffield has always been proud of its radical past.

As we watched from our hotel vantage point, I was reminded of the words of another writer: “People travel to faraway places to watch in fascination the kind of people they ignore at home.”

A student walked past, head in a book. A couple of ‘street ambassadors’ chatted to an Indian family. A group of Chinese students took videos on their phones of a wedding party emerging from the Town Hall. A woman in colourful African costume made her way from The Moor (with its much-lauded market – “Mr Zofani’s olives, from Iran, are wonderful,” according to Fr Naylor, “and the fish market is terrific”) towards St Marie’s Cathedral for its lunchtime service.

Superior Room

“Clean lines”

From our spacious top-floor suite of the 154-bedroom hotel we watched in further fascination as two men raised the Union Jack on the Town Hall tower, whose bells chime every quarter-hour. We could see a muddle of architectural styles: the cupola of the former Sheffield Telegraph building, part of Hallam University with the greenery of Norfolk Park beyond, St Marie’s spire.

The suite’s French windows looked onto a green area while, inside, the bedroom – sharing space with a dining area and lounge – was all soothing pale grey minimalism. There were two TVs, a large bathroom with freestanding bath and walk-in shower, an overall feeling of light and air, clean lines and glass.

We had dinner in the Governor Gupta restaurant, “the only Indian tapas restaurant in town”, according to food and beverage supervisor Claire Domville. She agreed that the hotel offers a different perspective on the city.

“It’s weird,” she said. “You’re used to walking along the street, at street level, and now you feel you could touch the clock on the Town Hall.” There’s also a bird’s eye view from the restaurant of the building’s wonderful carvings of metal-workers, steelworkers and cutlers.

The restaurant itself is subtly India-themed, with Bollywood music, framed Moghul paintings, the odd Rajasthani ornament, together with stylish wool-backed chairs in olive greens, pinks and blues, and ruby-red banquettes in the private booths.

Governor Gupta restaurant

“Stylish pots”

The culinary concept is ‘small plates’, so we shared cauliflower chaat (steamed and fried cauliflower in a masala sauce, with pomegranate seeds), melt-in-the-mouth paneer tikka, pine nut and onion pilau and roti. To finish: a delicious ras malia cake – almond cake with cardamon cream, orange rind, saffron and custard. It was all excellent, if a tad pricey for Sheffield (£15 for four pieces of paneer). Non-veg dishes include Bengali fish croquettes, Amritsari fish pao, Madras garlic butter prawns, Achari beef shortrib and ‘butterflied’ sea bream.

Breakfast the next day was a five-star, painstakingly presented, spread of juices, cereals, fresh and dried fruit, yoghurts, nuts, cheeses and cold meats. Plus stylish pots containing scrambled eggs, tomatoes, hash browns, bacon, sausages, with poached eggs and omelettes to order.

Our fellow guests included competitive swimmers (here for the annual Aquatics GB Summer Championships at Pond’s Forge just down the road), businesspeople (a range of conference rooms includes the Kinder Suite, complete with kitchen, outside courtyard and forthcoming bar), holidaymakers enjoying both what the city has to offer and the adjoining countryside (hence all the black and white photos of Peak District sights). Previous guests had included parents attending student graduations, festivalgoers (Tramlines music fest had just finished, Off the Shelf book festival is in a couple of months), other music lovers (the City Hall is just round the corner) and theatregoers.

The night we stayed, a couple from London were absorbing the view over cocktails. “It’s a lovely city,” said the woman, “really interesting. And this hotel is incredible. We’re so pleased it’s opened – and what a great position!”

Radisson Blu Hotel, 30 Pinstone Street, S1 2HN
0114-238 8968
www.radissonhotels.com/blu