ABSTRACT
If there is one thing that is clear about Sheffield it is that its external public image has – at least traditionally – been unremittingly bleak. From the eighteenth century onwards, the city was for most of its visitors ‘a damn’d bad place’, in George III’s memorable dictum, a city that lay under a pall of smoke and had few of the attributes of other places of distinction within the kingdom. This was in stark contrast to the quality of the surrounding landscape whose beauty has been extolled in direct proportion to the vilification heaped on the city. The very idea that Sheffield might be characterised by the quality of its urban design would, until very recent times, have seemed risible: the achievements of the past decade in these terms look remarkable.
