It's one of the small things that makes Sheffield Sheffield - we need to bring it back
The Star is campaigning to bring the 1 o’clock Time Signal back
There are a handful of things which make Sheffield unique.
The Scorpion at Forgemasters, the Women of Steel statue, Winter Garden and steelworker brickwork mural, all in the city centre, the spider’s web sculpture on the side of engineering firm Gripple and Park Hill flats are all famously Sheffield.
No single one makes Sheffield, and none are grand enough to attract tourists from across the world, but they are all part of the collage that makes the city feel like home.
The 1 o’clock Time Signal, no matter how small and potentially annoying, was part of that.
Previously based on the exterior of H. L. Browns jewellers, Barker’s Pool, it was something you wouldn’t find anywhere else - and while not as spectacular as something like Edinburgh's daily cannon fire or the Hull ‘time ball’, was a living part of our history.
The siren was introduced in 1874 as an innovative way for Harris Leon Brown to market his jewellers.
At the time, it would have been a cutting-edge piece of technology, helping Victorian shoppers to keep track of time and offering a unified signal for everyone to set their watches to.
One of the things we love so much about Sheffield is how it blends its industrial heritage with the modern world.
We’ve not torn down the Victorian factories and mills, we’ve adapted them, with Kelham Island particularly shining as an example of what you can achieve when you embrace the city’s history in its redevelopment.
Sheffield isn’t made up of indistinct glass skyscrapers, it’s not simply clean rows of beige new-build houses like you might find in other cities, it’s a jumbled cocktail of centuries of history blended together.
So we should be working to keep some of that history alive, to remind us daily not just how far we’ve come, but what work it took to make Sheffield what it is.
As Sheffield City Council continues to petition to become the UK’s next City of Culture, it’s these small features that may help push us over the line.
Things like the time signal show our city is more than just a collection of boutique bars and a massive shopping centre like others.
That’s why The Star is campaigning to bring the 1 o’clock Time Signal back, and it seems there’s a natural place it can go.
Next to the old police box on Surrey Street - once of 120 dotted around the city and which had a lamp on top which would light up to signal that an officer on patrol needed to answer the phone for an urgent message - the daily siren could help build up a small heritage corner by the Town Hall.
Craig Broadwith from the Sheffield Historic Building Trust suggested the building as its location, and this way it would be just a stone’s thrown away from its previous location and could be intertwined into history tours about the unique pieces of Sheffield history that have survived into the 21st century in one way or another.