The train from Sheffield to Dore & Totley takes only a few minutes. It ambles five miles out of the city as the surrounding greys shade to green. Sheffield is a famously leafy place — often called the greenest city in Europe — but even so, Dore & Totley station comes as a surprise. Two modest platforms and a handsome Victorian station are pressed hard against a densely wooded hillside.
It is early August, a cooler day than most in a severely hot summer that saw wildfires consume several kilometres of nearby woodland and the city’s reservoirs dry out. At the station waiting for me is Sally Goldsmith, a poet and historian who has lived in the area since 2007.
As we climb into her car, she tells me something of the area’s history. Industry, she explains, came late to this corner of Yorkshire, leading to a fierce independence of spirit that birthed a lasting tradition of religious nonconformism and political radicalism. Not that this is much on display as we drive back to her house, a late 19th-century terraced building that backs on to a recreation ground and a council estate.
It is not the house, nor the moorland beyond, that has brought me here. It is the sight from her bedroom window: just visible, crowning a hill and peeking over the dense foliage, is St George’s Farm, a large stone farmhouse built in the 18th century, and a rare reminder of the village’s radical past.
On April 27, 1876, in Walkley, a hilltop suburb to the west of Sheffield around six miles from Totley, around 20 men and women gathered to discuss the theme of “art and communism”. Joining them was one of mid-Victorian England’s most famous writers, John Ruskin, then the Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford University, who had founded the venue, the St George’s Museum, the year before.
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