The 23 June 1966 was a big day in Sheffield – as the next day’s Scotsman attested – the Queen Mother visited for two functions.
She attended the official opening of the Hyde Park flats in the afternoon, and before that the official opening of the Arts Tower at the University of Sheffield.
Much as I would like to write about the Hyde Park flats (you can read all about them and see some fabulous images here) they really don’t count as higher education, so we’ll have to visit the Arts Tower instead.
The Arts Tower is the big black monolith on the postcard and, as the name suggests, was built for the university’s arts faculty, and originally housed all 18 arts departments. As the university has grown, most have moved out, but the name remains.
For forty years it was the tallest building in Sheffield, described as “the most elegant university tower block in Britain of its period.” At nineteen floors it is half the height of the very similar looking Seagram Building in New York, designed by Mies van der Rohe, but the architect claims that the similarity is accidental – form followed function and location.
It got a refit in 2009–11, giving it double glazing and they sorted out the plumbing, which sounds like a very necessary job.
And most wonderfully, it has a paternoster lift. If you’ve never seen one, or been in one, the BBC article here has a lovely short film which is well worth a minute of your time. Pasternosters look scary and have obvious accessibility limitations but once you get used to them they can be fun. There was one at LSE where I studied and I have to say I really liked using it.
Why is it called a paternoster? Pater noster… (Our father…) is how the Christian Lord’s Prayer begins, in Latin. And saying a short prayer as you hop into the lift doesn’t seem unreasonable.
The card is unposted, so we don’t have an exact date. But the blue and white bus you can just see at the base of the tower suggests late 60’s (obviously, as the building was not there in the early 60s) up to 1974, when buses became coffee and cream under the auspices of the South Yorkshire Passenger Transport Executive. This was an artefact of the creation in 1974 of the metropolitan counties of England, and now under the control of the South Yorkshire mayor. If you follow the link, there’s some great archival footage of Sheffield in the 1970s and 1980s. And who doesn’t want to see that!
Here’s a jigsaw of the postcard, which I hope you enjoy. It’s good to be back after the summer break: please do let me know if there’s any universities you’d like me to write about.
