Happy Birthday St Paul's Parade

For that’s how old Sheffield’s St Paul’s Parade is on Friday.

But 25 years ago this month it was under threat of demolition.

And if it had not been for a city wide campaign led by The Star (with a little bit of help from yours truly) it would have gone.

Just think, we might have had something as hideous as No 1 St Paul’s Place instead.

The owners, London-based Colville Estates wanted to pull down the red sandstone and brick parade (where Laura Ashley now is).

Hitler’s bombs had failed but now a brash developer with a chairman called Sir Ashley Ponsonby, who called the building “an eyesore,” wanted to do the job.

But the parade was a little bit of old Sheffield left standing, one the council hadn’t blitzed itself.

It might not have been our best bit of architecture but it was one of the few we had left.

It housed a hotch-potch of businesses: the Army & General Stores (army surplus), Wicker Herbalist, Anglia Building Society, Overseas Aid Shop, Bouquets & Bows the florists, Sheffield Pen Centre, Sheffield Health Food Stores, Hearing Aid Services, Vernons the Bakers and Mr George the discount shop.

By contrast, today’s line up is far smaller: the Ha! Ha! bar taking up more than half the space with dress shop Karen Millen, job finders Premier People and an empty record store making up the numbers.

The Star’s then editor, David Flynn, an impish Irishman, knew a good campaign when he saw one.

He was backed by local MPs, the Hallamshire Historic Buildings Society, Friends of the Earth, Chamber of Trade, Victorian Society, local MPs and the city council, which had somehow given Colville planning permission in the first place.

Yours truly was dispatched to the front line to report almost daily on the progress of the battle and wave banners at the back of the crowd whenever The Star took a picture.

For a time it looked a losing battle. There had been a public inquiry in favour of Colville. The Minister for the Environment, Michael Heseltine, was unmoved.

The Parade, built in 1901 by Baptist philanthropist Frances Ebenezer Smith, who once invited ‘1,000 cabmen, tramps and scavengers to tea,’ struck a chord with local people.

The architect was John Dodsley Webster, responsible for a clutch of churches, the Jessop Hospital, now gone, Smith’s in Fargate and the Bainbridge Building in Surrey Street.

But we won.

The city council bought St Paul’s off Colville. It was rumoured to have paid 2 million. Council leader David Blunkett said it was less.

Perhaps he can tell us now how much it was?