Our Sheffield Is ... The Big Poem Callout

While in lockdown, many of us have been missing our favourite places, activities and people in Sheffield and we want to hear all about them.

We need your help to create Sheffield's BIG poem!

We want the bits about Sheffield that mean the most to you. A memory, a place, a person – anything you love about your time in the city. Something you’re proud of, something unusual, something only you might have noticed.

All you need to do to be involved is send us your words – they can be a single word, a single sentence, or a few lines. Post them on our Facebook page or tweet them to us using the hashtag #SheffieldLuv or add them as a comment to this blog post.

The finished piece will be collated and edited into a poem (or two!) by Writer in Residence, Nik Perring, to be displayed in very special way and will form something that will last way beyond the Year of Reading.

We might not be able to get out into the city as much as we like but that’s no reason for us not to celebrate Sheffield it and all it means.

For some gentle inspiration, below is an example of a poem Nik compiled from lines given to him in one of our recent writing Masterclasses. We can create something wonderful, and personal to you and to Sheffield.

Send us your lines and please include #SheffieldLuv in your posts.

Our Sheffield is  

Love parks and city squares with flowers and benches

with space to meet friends

not social distancing.

Our Sheffield is the vernacular:

Ey up love! Giyore!

It’s the people

overdoing food at The Cabin and seeing kids go to hug the stuffed bear,

it’s independence:

my first ever market with my shop

someone commuting on the same train

every day for 40 years

and going to Sheffield Central station, ready for a long trip.

Our Sheffield is that graffiti that says "I LOVE YOU WILL U MARRY ME?"

calm blue water at Redmires on a nice day

The restaurant we always go to in town with a wooden decoration we always wondered about conveniently hiding the fuse box

It’s heart pain in Canals, it’s rain touching water.

In Millhouses holding the stream within its bushy trees following my loneliness.

It’s the Northern General with the biggest hospital ground in Europe.

Our Sheffield is a guy I see singing on the moor

it’s the scaffolders on Chapel Walk

the cleaner at one of the high-rise apartment blocks overlooking town

the gardener that looks after the winter gardens.

It’s street pastors. It’s the short wall that makes the entrance to the

university building a squat courtyard.

It’s the fire station that used to be on Ringinglow Road

the Endcliffe park heron

and, of course that old couple kissing.

It’s the terraced houses balanced on steep streets, cranes on the horizon,

it’s poetry on walls.