Leeds Beckett University - City Campus,
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A Tale of Two Streets: Social and Urban Inequality in Sheffield 1900-1939
During 2013 the Fairness on the 83 Bus study revealed striking differences in income, health, and life expectancy between the north and south of the city of Sheffield. On this bus journey, life expectancy could change by up to ten years. Subsequent research reported on continued disparities in equality. From a personal perspective, this was more than a concerning set of statistics about my home city and became a turning point for me. I wanted to understand where these divisions came from, and why they had proved so persistent. To understand current inequality, I wanted to explore its roots, which led me on my own journey back to university and to the subject I had always wanted to study, history.
Addressing Inequality
I did not come to study history through a conventional route, but I always maintained a strong interest in the subject, taking short online courses and immersing myself in the literature and journal articles. Yet, my professional career has been spent in business, most recently as Chief Strategy Officer for a global sustainability organisation. In this role, I became familiar with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and how inequality continues to be a pressing challenge. As I worked with those frameworks, I began to ask how and when these divides first emerged, and what lessons might be drawn from the past. That motivation led me to enrol in a fourth master’s degree, my second at Leeds Beckett University, to investigate Sheffield’s inequality in the early twentieth century.
Two Streets, Two Different Experiences
At the turn of the twentieth century, many of the residential districts captured by the Fairness on the 83 bus Study had yet to be built. To uncover the origins of Sheffield’s inequality, I needed to trace the lives of families in earlier districts. As such, my research focuses on two streets: Furnace Hill, in what was the industrial heart of West Bar, and Endcliffe Vale Road, in one of Sheffield’s leafy western suburbs. Just two miles apart, these two streets represented two very different experiences of city life.
In Furnace Hill, families lived in overcrowded tenements or court houses, often shared with lodgers or extended family members. Pollution from the nearby industries, coupled with poor sanitation, led to high infant mortality rates. Children frequently left school early to work in low-paid and manual work to help supplement the household income. This created a cycle of limited social mobility; where you lived shaped both the quality and length of your education, which in turn dictated narrow employment opportunities, from errand boy or girl, hawker, or cutlery worker for example, reinforcing a class ceiling.
By contrast Endcliffe Vale Road, a tree-lined street of large villas and mansions, was home to solicitors, engineers, and industrialists, where most households employed live-in servants. Children were prepared for grammar schools, professional careers, and, in some instances, university. These homes had more rooms than occupants, and their gardens and green spaces offered both leisure and distance from the pollution of the industrial centre. This created a cycle of privilege; children had access to high-quality and extended education, and pathways into professional or managerial employment, reinforcing comfort, status, and class advantage across generations.
Figure 1 Entrance to John Tonks & Co. and Nos. 48–56 Furnace Hill, 1927, photograph, ref. u00722, Sheffield City Archives.
Figure 2 Furnace Hill, Sheffield, 2023. Photograph by the author
Figure 3 Sheffield, Lodge belonging to Endcliffe Grange, Endcliffe Vale Road, 1895–1915, photograph, ref. s15462, Sheffield City Archives.
Figure 4 Endcliffe Vale Road, Sheffield, 2023. Photograph by the author.
Sheffield’s Inequality in Context
Placing these two areas in their wider context revealed how deeply geography shaped life opportunities and the lack of social mobility. Housing shortages were common in industrial cities, but Sheffield’s rapid expansion in the early twentieth century accentuated the problem. Overcrowding in West Bar exacerbated the spread of disease. Speculative building meant profits were prioritised over quality, leaving many residents in cramped and insanitary conditions. Meanwhile, the city’s affluent western districts offered space, fresh air, and were marketed to gentlemen or the man of business.
Yet, inequality in early twentieth-century Sheffield did not go uncontested. If housing was the most visible marker of disparity, education and health also became the battlegrounds where reformers attempted to redress entrenched inequalities. Politics, too, was a site of struggle. Sheffield’s working-class residents did not simply endure their circumstances, but negotiated, resisted, and at times demanded change.
The interwar years brought some reforms. Labour’s control of Sheffield City Council from 1926 accelerated the building of council houses, and national legislation sought to expand access to education and healthcare. Yet reform was uneven. New housing estates were built primarily in the east of the city, with opposition from affluent residents keeping council housing away from the western suburbs. Through this residential segregation inequality was reinforced even as conditions improved. Geography continued to matter, and where you lived shaped your health, education and employment outcomes.
Why History Matters Today
Immersed in census records, archival materials, and newspaper articles, I was struck by parallels with the present. Many of the inequalities identified in the 1900–1939 period remain visible in Sheffield, and other cities, today. Studying history provided me with a framework to understand how inequality becomes structurally entrenched. Reforms may alleviate conditions, but without addressing geography and power, disparities persist. This perspective resonates with the SDG’s Goal 10, and reducing inequality cannot be achieved without recognising how deeply inequality is embedded in both space and history.
History, is not only about the past. It is about understanding the foundations of our present challenges and asking what can be learned. Tracing Sheffield’s early twentieth-century inequalities is a way of understanding why fairness remains elusive in the twenty-first.
From Business to Research
Studying for a fourth master’s degree might seem unusual, but it was a natural step. My career had been focused on strategy and sustainability, and history provided a way to explore similar themes, but through the lens of time.
The contrast between my time in business and in the archives revealed more similarities than I first expected. Both require attention to detail, the ability to see patterns across complex information, and the curiosity to ask challenging questions. Similarly, both demand clarity of thought and purpose. Yet, the field of history provided something new, and the chance to engage with the human stories from the past that lie behind statistics and structures.
Working-class families in Furnace Hill, professional households in Endcliffe Vale Road, reformers, politicians, and protestors, all of these voices shaped the city I live in today. To bring them together in a narrative of inequality is both an academic task and a personal passion. Looking ahead, I hope to extend this research to other cities to see whether they experienced similar cycles of inequality, and to pursue this further through PhD research. Studying the history of inequality is not only about uncovering the past, as it can also contribute to how we think about fairness in the future.
