Conclusion

Abstract

My mum and dad met in a steelworks in the mid-1970s. Like my grandparents, they both lived in Rotherham, but they worked at Hadfields, one of the bigger and most well-renowned works in Sheffield. It doesn’t exist anymore, it closed down in 1984, when the site was flattened as part of a ‘regeneration’ project in the East End of the city. Meadowhall Shopping Centre was built on the site in 1990, and most people under the age of 30 don’t realise that thousands of people used to work in offices and on the shop floor where they now buy their clothes and designer doughnuts. Meadowhall is massive, but not as massive as the full site that Hadfields used to occupy, some of which is still wasteland or overspill car parks and can be seen when approaching by train or tram. The fact that Meadowhall was the second largest shopping centre in Britain when it opened gives some indication of the scale of just one works in the life of the city. That a key institution in the industrial life of the city since 1872 was replaced by a bastion of consumerism, aspira-tional affluence and national culture says something about the death of traditional, industrial working-class culture brought about by Margaret Thatcher’s attack on manufacturing. Richard Hoggart was right to predict this demise in The Uses of Literacy, but it would happen much later and be prompted by changes to work and not American comic books and films — but that is another story, for another book.