Post-War Rebuilding: A New Battle for the Castle

Abstract

A new opportunity to record the remains of Sheffield Castle emerged at the end of the 1950s in the wake of post-War rebuilding. The Brightside and Carbrook Co-op’s store at the corner of Waingate and Exchange Street was destroyed during the bombing of Sheffield on the night of 12th/13th December 1940 (Figure 4.1). In 1949, following the compulsory purchase of their bombed headquarters by the City Council, the Co-op moved their city-centre store to temporary prefabricated premises on nearby Angel Street, before receiving planning permission for a new, more imposing, headquarters in 1958 (Figure 4.2).17 While the Castle Hill Market buildings to the north of the Co-op store ‘largely escaped damage’ (Himsworth 1927–42, 20), and temporary structures (socalled Bailey bridges) were used to ensure continued access to them (Zasada 1996, 32), parts of the Castlegate area remained derelict into the late 1950s (Butcher 1972c, 5). In 1958 the Sheffield Corporation began construction of Castle Market on the site of the former Co-op, with the intention of incorporating the Castle Hill Market into a single market-complex (Butcher 1972a, 5; Richardson and Dennison 2014a, 36; see their fig. 3 for the main elements of this complex). The new Castle Market building was intended to rehouse traders from the 100-year-old Norfolk Market Hall to the south of Exchange Street, and Castle Hill Market was refurbished and provided with new access from Castlegate (see Figure 1.15). New buildings were constructed or rebuilt fronting onto Waingate from the junction of Exchange Street to the Bull & Mouth public house at the corner of Castlegate (Zasada 1996, 32; Butcher 1972a, 10). As in the late 1920s, a formal programme of archaeological investigation was not required in advance of this regeneration of the area, but the castle remains encountered in the course of construction works were recorded by Leslie Butcher from Sheffield City Council’s Architect’s Department and John E. Bartlett, Deputy Director of the City Museum. In this chapter we discuss the nature of the recording undertaken and the resulting archive, which is an essential prelude to analysing what was found in the next chapter.