'Let's help future generation move upwards - quite literally' - Nancy Fielder column
Who remembers Kelvin Flats?
We're building upwards. We've done it before and we are doing it again.
Streets in the sky has a meaning unique to Sheffield. If there isn't room for a milkfloat to deliver pints door to door ... does it even count?
I am thrilled by the story you will have read on today's front page about hundreds of new homes on the way. We need more places for people to live and normal folk need to be able to afford it. It is the same demand as that which saw huge blocks for flats appear many moons ago.
Some of the tallest homes of the past are no longer with us, others have been through attempts at gentrification with eye watering price tags.
Who remembers Kelvin Flats? That's a rhetorical question. Everybody in Sheffield remembers the zigzag structure that dominated the Hillsborough skyline and beyond.
As with all neighbourhoods, you get different stories about what it was like to live there depending on who you talk to and which era you discuss.
Many loved it for a long time but it lost its sparkle and, in the end, couldn't survive.
I grew up on the other side of town but would go past a couple of times a week on my way to music practice in the old Langsett School.
Back then, the council had an incredible music service and you would see children from all over the city heading that way burdened with saxophone cases or, worst still, a double bass.
If you were lucky, you would get a lift home when somebody's parent had finished work early. If they didn't turn up, you just stood around then caught a bus for 2p. What else could you do before mobile phones existed?
As you waited on that spot, you could gaze in awe at the new addition of Sheffield's great ski slope. Quite the wonder for kids growing up in the 1980s with lives where dreaming of ski holidays wasn't even a thing.
Langsett was always a beautiful building although, if memory serves me correctly, not ideal for a modern school. It was built in 1879 by Sheffield School Board and closed in 1976. By the time it became a music hub, all the surrounding back-to-back housing and heavy industry had gone.
After music services were slashed, you won't be surprised to hear it was almost knocked down until an inspirational group of Sheffield volunteers stepped in and saved it.
It featured in The Full Monty in 1996 and reopened as the wonderful Burton Street Foundation in 1998 - but I digress.
The old flats are just distant memories and incoming are the skyscrapers with hundreds of apartments.
The latest plan makes sense - a small patch of land and hundreds of homes in what will be one of the city's tallest buildings.
The site at the junction of Farm Road and Queens Road is ideal. A very central location, no green belt - just an abandoned plot which will soon see a tower soaring many storeys high.
We have discussed this scheme at length in our office and, to be honest, I have walked past that spot hundreds of times without ever really noticing it.
As a kid I would have been on my way to Silver Blades, as an adult I am hunting for parking close to the station that doesn't cost an arm and a leg.
Long gone is the British Rail Club Sports Ground, a sad example of a culture and communities which have faded to almost nothing over the decades.
In its place will be 216 one-bedroom flats, 184 two-bedroom apartments and nine three-bedroom units.
The future is roof terraces for residents rather than lager-top for workers, and that has to be a good thing for everybody.
There is uproar across this city at the Local Plan. We have been waiting for it for a long, long, long time and, even now, it just doesn't tick the right boxes for anyone.
What these new homes show is that there is plenty of land that can be built upon and nobody minds.
The new residents might not be in the 'heart of the city' but what an amazing spot for the station, football, college, a beautiful park and ... McDonalds.
Isn't this where the focus should be for our planners and politicians? Making sensible decisions that will help generations of the future get on the housing ladder - going upwards quite literally.