Attractive city centre is doing just fine

I had to visit Sheffield on Friday, May 18, to attend to a business matter.
Cranes on the skyline in Sheffield city centreCranes on the skyline in Sheffield city centre
Cranes on the skyline in Sheffield city centre

After attending to the business I thought I would like to spend some time looking round Sheffield where I was born and bred. I lived in the city until I retired at 63 years of age, over 21 years ago.

I read The Star every day, so I know there has been a lot of changes since I came to live in Rotherham.

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Why the professional moaners keep on knocking the city I don’t know. It is, as Gary Speck says in Friday’s Star, a nice place to live.

Maybe they don’t like change. You cannot stop things changing. Yesterday is now history.

People would not be investing millions of pounds putting buildings up if they were not going to get a return on this investment. So something must be fine in Sheffield.

There are more tower cranes than church steeples now. So people must think that Sheffield is an attractive place to invest in.

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Like all places, it has its faults of the council’s making, but they must be getting more right than wrong. They have made the city centre attractive.

For the last twenty years or so I have been to different cities and towns on reunions with the Suez Veterans’ Association.

I have yet to visit anywhere better than Sheffield.

People in the Association who have visited Sheffield for various reasons have all commented about the city centre and the approach to the railway station being a credit to the city.

I remember us once visiting Gloucester for a reunion and thinking a county city would be good. What a let down. I stood outside of the Glorious Gloucester Regimental Museum, which is only two minutes from the main shopping precinct, to find six inches of grass growing in the gutter.

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Back to my visit to Sheffield last Friday. I was sitting in the sunshine people-watching and listening to a busker playing his music, when I was approached by a man who shook my hand and asked if I was having a good day, only then to be asked if I had any loose change to give him for a cup of tea.

He got two letters from me in reply, not two words, NO.

M Thompson

Rotherham