ABSTRACT
The urban form of Sheffield, by contrast, which was determined by a topography of valleys and hills, but also evolved according to the necessary imperative of building a mass of residential areas well to the west of the city’s smoky industrial East End, did not result in the creation of a recognisable inner-city concentric circle or ‘zone of transition’. The major area of settlement and ghettoisation in Sheffield in the 1980s and 1990s, Burngreave and Pitsmoor, in its first incarnation was a wellestablished inner area of Victorian housing, which, on account of its proximity to two major hospitals, was home to many practising doctors and their families. The initial migration of a West Indian population into this area in the late 1940s and through the 1950s, indeed, was a result of a recruitment drive by the Northern General and Fir Vale hospitals, facing a shortage of nursing and auxiliary medical staff. This inmigration was accompanied by a search conducted by local steel firms for semi-skilled labour, with some West Indian workers setting up house in Pitsmoor, as neighbours of other migrants from the islands already established in the medical service. Several other areas of the city, however (Sharrow, Crookesmoor, Nether Edge, Broomhall and Park), were also settled, and, even though Pitsmoor in a local Council survey in 1988 was reported as having the highest proportion of black residents (at about 16 per cent of Burngreave ward) of any area in Sheffield (Sheffield City Council, Department of Land and Planning 1988: Figure 3), it was in no sense a ghetto into which were crowded the bulk of the local black Sheffield population. Nor, importantly, was the area of Pitsmoor/Burngreave historically an area of poverty (its solid Victorian houses being bought up by families working in secure jobs in the local hospitals) and/ or an archetypal ‘zone of transition’, the first ‘port of call’ of all new migrants in the last two centuries looking to find a home in their new society. It is not clear that the city of Sheffield has ever contained such an area. In 1991, more than 62 per cent of all houses in Burngreave ward were owner-occupied and only 7 per cent were without a car. A survey in a national Sunday newspaper of forty ‘dreadful’ (‘nogo’) estates and inner-city areas across the country in 1994 identified the presence of such areas in many major cities, including Manchester, Bradford, Leeds, Liverpool and Newcastle, but not in Sheffield (Independent on Sunday 17 April 1994).
