Jodenkaro

When I was a pupil at Pipworth Road Junior School in the 50's my class was taken there for a factory tour. I can't remember much about it except that we were each given a loaf of sliced white bread as a memento. I think i ate mine on the way home.

Eddy Cochran

I don't think anyone in their right mind would deny that Sheffield has better facilities now than it ever did, and some of the monstrous planning mistakes of the past 40 years are being cleared away, but that in itself does not make it a better place to live. What makes a place a home to be proud of are its citizens. I remember when Sheffield was called the 'biggest village in England' because of the friendliness of its people. I was born here and, apart from 10 years living in Lincoln, I have always lived here. I am not sure that I want to for much longer. Nothing stays the same but that does not mean that change is always a good thing. Perhaps we have not yet learned the secret of how to keep the baby when we throw the bathwater away.

When I was at Pipworth Junior we had houses named after reservoirs: Ewden, Ladybower, Rivelin and Derwent. When I moved to Firth Park Grammar, the houses were mainly named after WW1 generals (Foche, Hague, Beattie) except for mine, which was Kings.

I lived on the Manor from 1949 to the early 60's. We lived with my Gran at first, on Stanground Road, then moved to a flat above the Ward's fruit shop on Prince of wales Road. I remember being sent for a haircut every few weeks to an old guy who lived further down the street. He used to cut hair in his greenhouse at the bottom of his garden. The thing I remember most about him was that he constantly wheezed in my ear as he cut my air. He must have been cheap because there always seemed to be hordes of kids waiting their turn. Pipworth was an ace school and I was very happy there. There were lots of good teachers (Mrs Tucker, Miss Dawson, Miss Glen and the big guy who ran the football teams), lots of good mates and always something going on. I never walked to Ford, but we cycled there most weekends. In fact we cycled all over Derbyshire at a very young age. I doubt kids of that age now would be allowed to do what we did, even if they wanted to. It may be pure nostalgia but life was simpler, neighbours were better and life as a child was a bigger adventure.

Sheffield has always been a city that various parties have loved to knock about a bit. The castle got demolished in the Civil War when the Roundheads and the Royalists fell out. The City Centre got the crap kicked out of it by Hitler and the LA planners have done their best to strip it of every interesting or historical building since then. But what I really miss are the communities that have been broken apart by the destruction of Sheffield's staple industries. I used to work on Weedon Street in the 60's and 70's and remember the streets of houses that filled the spaces between the dozens of steelworks in the area (and the way that the housewives cursed when they all belched noxious orange fumes out of their chimneys each Friday afternoon). I do not see the World through the rose tinted spectacles of nostalgia but there was something comforting about corner shops and local pubs that is missing from the world today. These communities were full of characters with character. Most of us seem shallow and superficial by comparison. I miss the Mojo and the Esquire and getting ****** by accident, not design. But its still a whole lot better than Leeds.

I used to spend hours making Airfix kits of battleships and world war 2 aircraft. Then my mother made me give them all to my younger brother and he wrecked the lot.