Sheffield

The good fight

Although they don’t always make a big thing of it, allusions to military architecture fit rather well with the martial metaphor used by the Salvation Army – ministers and lay leaders given quasi military ‘ranks’, places of worship called citadels, the use of brass bands.* There are quite a few Salvation Army citadels with facades that draw on the vocabulary of fortification: turrets, crenellations, arrow slits. This one in Sheffield, designed by William Gilbee Scott, is a good example. It has been empty for nearly 20 years since the Army left,† but plans are afoot to renovate and repurpose the building with minimal changes to the front, at least.

What we have for now is a fine if dilapidated facade, which is castle-like at the very top, with its trinity of towers, the central one larger and turreted, to resemble a gatehouse. Behind it’s mostly a brick shed, fitted out within with raked seating and a balcony, rather like a theatre. There are big windows, at which point the similarity to a castle fades away, yielding to the necessity for a light interior in which one can read the words in one’s songbook.

The building presents an assertive face to the world then, but this is hardly inappropriate for the Army, who combine their hands-on, hard-working approach to solving social ills with an ethos of vigorous preaching. It’s also right for a big city like Sheffield, which is hardly a place for architectural shrinking violets.§ There are a lot of assertive facades in this city, all yelling for attention. Why should the devil have all the best fronts?

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* And it should be emphasised that it is a metaphor. The Salvation Army fights by getting out there and helping people who need help.

† For a location in Psalter Street: you couldn’t make it up.

§ Although it can sometimes be a place for thriving architectural buddleia, alas. I do hope the botanic invasion of this facade is put right soon. This is the last of Sheffield from me, for a while. On to other matters soon – although I do hope to cover the city’s great neighbour Leeds in the not too distant future.