Anders Hanson

I’ve always liked taking photos, ever since I was a small child and my parents gave me a camera. I was also slightly obsessive about taking photos of buildings and landscapes rather than people. That has pretty much stayed with me, although I do now take photos of my friends and family so I have a record of these things. In the last few years though I have started taking more and more photos, and since moving back to Sheffield a couple of years ago it has become an even bigger hobby. Taking photos though has become an obsession again though since moving to the city centre a few months ago.

The obsession with taking photos has probably come about through a mixture of having some good weather recently (makes a change), having more free time at the weekends, but most of all by realising how much of the city centre is changing. So it’s ended up becoming a bit of a mission to record more and more of the city centre before it changes for good. My big regret is that I don’t have a decent camera to do it with. Instead I am relying on my camera phone, until I can afford a decent camera.

I’ve uploaded many of these photos to my Flikr site, so some of these photos will be in the public domain when the redevelopment starts. The most significant ones for me are:

• Gillott’s Pearl Works on Eyre Lane. Although this building does not have much architectural merit, it is none the less an unusual aspect of the city’s industrial heritage. It is just down the road from where I now live, but the final Gillott to own the firm lived opposite me when I was growing up. I knew him less for his family business, and more for the time it would take for him to get his car back in to his drive after his once a week trip out in it to church on a Sunday.
• Park Hill flats. Love them or loath them, they are a dramatic piece of architecture and now look as though they will be here to stay. But instead of being the ’streets in the sky’ that transformed this part of the city from back to back slums to modern flats, they will instead become yuppy apartments.
• Grosvenor House Hotel. Not exactly a much loved building, but one of the main Sheffield hotels since it was built as part of the big rebuilding schemes after the Second World War and through the 60s and 70s. It will, along with most of the surrounding area, be demolished for the ‘New Retail Quarter’ over the next few years.
• Aizlewood’s Mill. A building that was saved from demolition some years ago, and is now the home to a host of small businesses and organisations.
• North Bank. One of the newest office blocks to be built in Sheffield, and in my view, one of the most impressive.
• Exchange Street. This area is already changing dramatically, and this once bustling road that was at the heart of the markets area will also be completely transformed over the next few years. I only hope they open up the castle ruins that lie underneath.

FLIKR: Anders Hanson Sheffield album