Here is a selection of libraries in Sheffield: Totley, Hillsborough, Highfield and Manor. The buildings they occupy, or occupied, are one way of telling the story of the public library – and popular reading – in Sheffield. On 1 February … Continue reading
By Natalie Haigh Natalie is a student at Sheffield Hallam University and has been taking part in our joint project through the university’s Ideas into Action initiative. Here is Natalie’s account of how she became a reader. My name is … Continue reading
On Monday 20 September 1909, Sheffield Council hosted a reception in the Town Hall to mark the annual conference of the Library Association, which was being held in the city for the first time.[i] For once my interest in library … Continue reading
By Mary Grover Erica Jeremiah was born in Totley in 1937, to comfortably-off parents. The family moved to Hathersage, where Erica grew up, coming into Sheffield regularly. She studied German at King’s College London and worked as a teacher. She … Continue reading
Privates John Charles Hobson and John Sydney Abey have lain in the soil of northern France for over a hundred years. Of the 5,000 men Sheffield lost in the First World War, they are the only library workers, and their … Continue reading
…then when my mother-in-law died, we’d only been married a year, I found a cookbook and I kept that. And my daughter rang and she said, have you still got that recipe for Granny’s … I’ve forgotten the name. Well, … Continue reading
My dad picked me up and carried me around to me aunt’s house because she had a cellar, and we went down the cellar. And as he was carrying me around, I could see all these beautiful lights in the … Continue reading
Some of our Reading Sheffield interviewees had vivid memories of the contribution religion made to their reading lives. … the services were a bit boring but the actual working out [of] the words that I’d never heard, was fascinating. This … Continue reading
Gillian Applegate was born on 27 October 1941, in Frecheville which was then in Derbyshire but is now part of Sheffield. Gillian worked first in banking but later became a college librarian. She married in 1964, and her husband, Norman, … Continue reading
Writing up our own reading journeys has long been the plan for the Reading Sheffield team (here is our web designer Lizz’s reading journey). The threat to libraries across the country brought the task into sharp focus for me. Libraries … Continue reading