OS Explorer map 278, Sheffield & Barnsley: Rotherham– I do not own this map, but had visited it before starting this blog. Visited again for this post 26th September 2023.
I visited this map area as part of my All Line Rover trip in September 2022, travelling around Britain by train, for which I did day-by-day blog posts already, and am now going through doing my regular posts about the new map areas I visited. The main content below will therefore be just a lightly edited version of relevant parts from my post about Day 10 of the trip – for a more connected narrative I recommend taking a look there instead. The Previous Visits section will be new though!
I arrived into Sheffield on the train from Manchester, on the final day of my trip where I was making my way home to Cambridge with several stops. Arriving in Sheffield, I had a brief wander through the town centre. I’ve been to Sheffield before, but didn’t remember it particularly well, it was nice! I really enjoyed chancing on the Winter Garden, a kind of indoor arboretum inside a striking arched wood and glass building.
I didn’t hang around in the city, as I had a plan: after my short wander, I got on a tram at City Hall, heading a few miles out of the city centre to the suburb of Attercliffe – this ticked off the second-last British tram system, and after Nottingham a couple of hours later, I’d have been on them all on this trip! I have to say, while my tram journey was good, Sheffield’s rather boxy trams are in my opinion the least pretty of the trams currently operating in Britain. There’s just something less sleek about them than, say, the Blackpool ones above, though Sheffield’s tram-trains are marginally prettier.
From Attercliffe, I walked the twenty minutes or so to Darnall station, in the suburb of the same name, there to catch the hourly train service heading from Sheffield out towards Lincoln. Darnall station was South Yorkshire’s least used station in 2019-20, with only about thirty users per day, which is extremely low for an urban station. I expect this is probably dreven by the infrequent service compared to the nearby buses and trams, but it probably doesn’t help that the station is hidden away behind some terraced houses and is, unfortunately, pretty grim: there was rubbish and graffiti everywhere. My obstacle for the day was passing through a group enjoying some cannabis in the narrow subway to access the far platform. Oh well!
From Darnall, I got the train in the Lincoln direction, to change in Worksop for Nottingham, which would be my final stop of the trip!
Previous visits
My school friend Joystick went to university in Sheffield, so I travelled there a couple of times to visit him. One particularly memorable occasion, and the only one for which I can find any photos, is when Cabbage and I visited him there in December 2015, to go to watch Star Wars: The Force Awakens on its opening night, and in costume!
I also remember walking around Sheffield town centre, and him taking us in the very cool paternoster lift!
Visiting all the maps! 