Sheffield Shorts: Into the megatron

I confess, when I set up the Looking Up Sheffield podcast, many moonbeams ago, I wanted listeners to look up at the buildings, the skies and the gargoyles all around them as they traversed the city.

But, sometimes, it pays to look down too - to embrace balance, darkness and light, history, ingenuity, ecosystems, rivers and a world-build that exists under thousands of commuters’ feet without them even knowing about it - yes, a journey to the megatron. I went for a walk with the Sheaf & Porter Rivers Trust to find out more about the city, and rediscover things I thought I’d lost about myself.

John, one of the two tour guides who has taken us - in waders, hard hats and miners’ lamps like we’re starring in Jeunet & Caro’s Delicatessen - into the heart of Sheffield’s Victorian storm drain network, dims his lamp, and asks us all to do the same - and we are suddenly in the absolute pitch black.

Above us, the city carries on in its admittedly understated summer Sunday way, unaware (apart from the local constabulary who have to be notified that there’s a bunch of hardy explorers under ground, in case of mishap, claustrophobia or cray fish attack), while we go on a two-hour walk along the River Porter and Sheaf (didn’t even get my 10,000 steps though, its slow going amid the knee deep water and wild life rubble we have to navigate). In parts, we have to drop to all fours to navigate this series of tunnels which diverted the rivers, erased the ponds and swamps, and readied Sheffield for the arrival of the Midland railway and, later, the Parkway and digital campus, complete with slide. Lamps back on, we resume our type-one type fun.

We’ve had to crawl on all fours to get here, under the Leadmill (Jarvis famously sung about the experience in Wickerman, see the lyrics reproduced here) and I’ve never been more grateful for lockdown yoga with Adrienne to be flexible enough to negotiate the space. Our collective worlds just got larger, and smaller, at the same time - a journey into the very heart of darkness. There’s even a Curt on the tour. Close enough.

It may be a celebration of darkness, but this fantastic tour, organised by the Sheaf & Porter Rivers Trust, is really about welcoming the light and the life back into the rivers, famously closed off for so long. Daylighting has enabled new perspectives and wildlife to return, no more globules from little mesters or Cocker’s caramel undertones.

Ultimately, the volunteers are leading up to four summer tours a day to raise £60,000 so that commuters on platform five can actually see the river under their feet. There’s a trapdoor (I’m counselled against opening it in case a train falls in (note, this would be unlikely unless it was a very small train) which could be replaced with re-inforced glass. A second portal opens up “somewhere on the Parkway”. The light is something that we embrace throughout the tour - emerging from a tunnel into glorious nature like we’re in Threads Redux, or seeing a beguiling glimpse of the newly exposed Castlegate pocket park like an eye of Sauron at the end of the Megatron rainbow. Like much of Sheffield, the tunnels are very filmic - as well as Threads, Delicatessen and Apocalypse Now, I think of Orson Welles, and the Wonkatania.

Diverting the river in a series of elaborate and complex tunnels must have required huge fortitude from our Victorian forefathers. The tunnels inevitably came before the station, and there are beautifully crafted features that they must have laboured through without any notion of what was to come, and what it was all for. They just got on in all conditions and built our future dreams and nightmares.

Spoiler: once you’ve got past the fact that you are crawling through a series of tunnels in darkness, with rubble all around you, debris from the rivers that feed in from Millhouses and beyond, discarded cutlery and pottery and once you’ve worked out how to stay upright, there’s not a lot to see in there.

But the smallest discoveries become enormous. A bit of pottery. A brick. Sean Bean stickers. Profound slogans on the entrances. What does it all mean? Regression is the main form of expression, as we gather excitedly around another small find. It’s like dystopian rockpooling with the kids, picking over the scraps of 200 years of Sheffield history. I found myself, like Martin Sheen, going inward. As we emerge, it feels like we’ve survived something.

It’s not just rubble down there. There’s crayfish/crustaceans, even the odd solo nomadic walker/photographer looking for that elusive shot of solitude.

The Trust stress that organised tours are the best way to experience the tunnels, and I was very indebted to human help as I nearly took a tumble or two, and the hard hats that kept my noggin free to let my mind wander into some dark and illuminating places. Not for the faint-hearted, the dyspraxic or the accident prone (I am a little bit all three and I loved it, but this was thanks to the amazing tour guides). An entirely unexpected afternoon bimble, all in all.