Ode to Sheffield

I decided to move here in 2018 without a strong reason. I had to leave Norwich, that was apparent, and I had on-the-road work based in Nottingham. Most of my family’s Northern, so the idea of moving to the Midlands didn’t really do it for me, it was gonna be Leeds, Sheffield, or Manchester I figured. It was my first trip to Sheffield that made up my mind.

My childhood friend Alice had been living here a while, and she really loved the city. Alice was cool, we shared a lot in politics and taste, so I thought it was a bona fide recommendation. I came up to Heeley to see what it was about.

I remember thinking it felt real, no bullshit, not curated. Childhood nostalgia while contemplating my future. Cuppers wasn’t even a consideration, I just wanted somewhere real. I’ll always be grateful to Alice for that pint.

So naively, I assumed anywhere within a few miles of the Sheaf would feel much the same. It didn't. That probably says more about how little I knew of big cities, and the North in general, than it does about Sheffield.

I found a cheap flat in Manor for £400/month. The letting agent, assuming I already knew the area, reassured me things had calmed down after some recent trouble. I'd never even heard of Manor or Woodthorpe, let alone followed the local news. The flat was top floor and overlooking Manor Park fields (RIP recently burned), so I blissfully ignored the red flags and moved into my flea-infested penthouse that week. It felt like a good place to begin.

Living in Manor was well alright, the neighbours were sound, the Singhs premier was cracking, the evening light at the Parkway Asda can be really special. It did feel pretty isolating though, I mean, there’s no speciality coffee or craft beer up there still.

I had to get out and make some friends.

The summer of 2019 was a hot one. It was a fucking good time to be exploring.

Division Street back then was the independent heart of the city, it was just obviously the place to be. Loads of sick shops, people bumping tunes on the green, Dev’s skatepark. That summer it brought me so much joy.

The routine was simple.

In Slugger I could ask Forde about skate spots to try out, scab stickers or buy clothes if I was feeling flush. There’s that old childhood nostalgia again. Slugger is still there and going strong. It’s one of those grassroots skate shops where you’re not sure if everything is perfectly curated or whether they’ve just sold out of everything you don’t like. Shops like this are essential platforms. They quietly give people somewhere to hang and somewhere to start. Sex Skateboards grew directly out of it, with Dead Dave, Baghead Crew and countless others passing through its orbit.

I could bang on about the skateboarding and music forever, but that wouldn’t go so far in explaining why Cuppers started, and why we’ll always be, in Sheff.

So back then the coffee scene in Sheffield was different. There weren’t tonnes of shops, and the big city centre players basically bossed it: Tamper, Marmadukes, Steam Yard - Upshot out on Glossop Road being the exception. Sheffield was dominated by shops that felt like the peak of third wave coffee, Ozone, Square Mile, and Origin, in Loveramics-style cups with great latte art. At this time Tamper had three sites and was probably the biggest name, it’s shrunk since and become less relevant on the speciality scene, but it’s still killer for brunch.

Crookes is weird, I still quite like it. Back in 2019 it was pretty much the perfect example of Sheffield's gentrification culture clash. Its position in the city makes it a really desirable place to live, and its proximity to the University of Sheffield keeps it full of bright young minds with somebody’s money to spend, but its high street was still totally sparse.

A coffee shop opened up there that year, Whaletown, and although it wasn’t started by Sheffielders, it was definitely DIY and rough around the edges. Jordan and Stephen, an Oxfordshire indie musician and an Irish art punk, staffed the shop, their dynamic together was jokes. I loved it, just sitting there watching the guys get swamped by students asking for stupid drinks one minute, then having to explain a flat white and why the drinks aren’t hot to a disgruntled local the next, all while battling the constant condensation pouring down the crumbling shop front.

One more shout-out up there before we roll out… Two Sheds. I often hate on micropubs, the micro aspect just doesn’t do it for me, but back then Ken at Two Sheds nailed it.

The top of the hill was all well and good, but it’s a microcosm of our city and our story. The full monty beating heart of Sheffield lies north of the ring road under the train tracks, where the city’s warehouses and estates sprawl out all the way to Meadowhell. This is where we set up to get the business off the ground.

Dave was always dropping by for coffees, complaining about the rubbish outside or the less than desirable neighbours, and telling us Attercliffe and Brightside were on the way up - “look at Kelham Island lads, that’ll be round here in a couple of years”. Although I’m not sure I agree with him entirely, I mean it’s been 5 years already and not much has changed, he’s right in that we weren’t the only ones out there making moves. Harley’s prayers were answered when we realised there's a craft brewery out here.

I could write all day about North Sheff, but it would inevitably start reading like some poverty porn “we’re so real because we were out there” bullshit. If I’m writing about where we come from though, I have to write about Spital Hill.

Spital Hill is like Crookes, if Crookes was in Yemen. And Yemen was full of Pakistanis, Kashmiris, Somalis, Caribbeans and basically every diasporic community that Sheffield's industrial history has brought together. The street and its immediate surroundings are intense, in the best way.

Barista work is just one of a bunch of repetitive hospo skills you can reach master level at. Shawarma line might not have latte art, but they’re performing for you and you know it. Sometimes you walk in and there’s a new guy, and it’s exactly like when you go for a coffee but the barista’s on smoko, shit. The guys in Shaz are like a football team, the MVP changes with time but Callum can tell if he’s made the wrap even after 30 minutes in the bag. We all put on weight.

I’d been in this city 5 years before I got excited about its coffee scene. That might say more about me than it does about Sheffield, I didn’t have trouble romanticising pubs. Either way, 2023-2025 felt like the cultural turning point for cafes in Sheffield, suddenly there were loads of options. It’s as if everyone had the same read on the city back in 2019, but it just took a while for all the baristas to get their shit together.

Over the past 5 years, our city’s scene has not only caught up with the rest of the country, but overtaken much of it in terms of variety and quality… and this change has been led by baristas, not by roasters or larger Sheffield institutions

So over the past decade nearly all of Cuppers has lived in Hillsborough, I moved there in 2021. The place is an anomaly, a perfect example of Sheffield dictating when it’s ready for change, or when it isn’t.

When I went to view our house in Hillsborough, I thought it looked like Melbourne. Open streets, Victorian terraces, trams rattling through. If you stand on the crossroads at just the right bit in low afternoon sunlight you might see what I mean. That’s where the comparison ends though, it’s nothing like anywhere else in the world.

See it’s not like Hillsborough isn’t ready for speciality coffee, Tramstop and Depot will serve you a great flat white, but full on uppity yuppity nonsense will never take over.

I mean you’ve got craft beer at Pangolin, the incredible Orange Bird, Depot for sourdough, but they all occupy the periphery, with The Rawson Spring, B&M, and Owlerton Stadium centre stage. Hillsborough, like Attercliffe, had a heyday, but Hillsborough never fully let it go. The grand architecture of the Wetherspoons, the incredible fortress of a Morrisons, the crumbling shopping arcades, they all suggest that this is a fucking centre, not a satellite of Sheffield.

I don’t want to stray any further into the cliché, but I’ll write down a line I’ve spoken aloud to friends many times. Sheffield is the geographic centre of the UK, and culturally it’s the most honest, straight down the line, balanced representation of an English city I can find. Within that, Hillsborough stands as a kind of time capsule, effortlessly maintaining equilibrium as the world changes around it. Walk down the high street on a Friday morning, a Friday evening, and then Saturday lunchtime and you’ll know what I mean - don’t wear red on derby day.

By the middle of 2024 we’d outgrown our second unit with Dave. We would’ve been happy to stay where we were geographically, the privacy and proximity to Shaz suited us at the time, but the idea of moving to a more public space was one we regularly bounced around. Dave, to be fair to him, tried really hard to keep us in the area, using all of his contacts to try find us a suitable warehouse, but nothing came off, so the decision to leave the area was made for us.

We viewed stuff all over, but our needs were pretty specific - three-phase power, lorry access, offices, kitchen, gas, non-residential for chimneys, no funny smells, has to be somewhat charming etc, must be cheap(ish)... I could go on. We were either gonna settle or have to build it ourselves.

The site itself dates back to the early 20th century. Back then the forges and breweries of Kelham filled the valley below, workers’ terraces climbed the hills into Pitsmoor and Burngreave above, and the railway community of Parkwood Springs covered the slope that would later become the burning ski village. Wedged between Stanley and Saxon Works, our patch of Rutland Road sat right in the middle of the whole thing.

The building eventually became part of the larger Saxon Works, and was operated as a chemical factory of sorts until at least the mid-70s. You can see it in her 3ft-deep floor, blast doors, and general demeanour. She made paints, lubricants, and probably a whole load of handy toxic emulsions only my grandad has heard of. I don’t think it was an easy life, but given her unique perch deep in industrialised England, I’d say she did alright.

In the early 2000s Norton’s took the building on to use as a fireplace/stove showroom, this was her first rejuvenation. The low-impact operation was perfect for a building like this, and the location was ideal for a destination business. When you’re looking for something like a stove, 5 minutes’ drive from town is no biggie, and exposed brickwork and mid-century industrial aesthetics are pretty much the perfect backdrop for selling build quality and oldey timey reliability. The Norton family preserved her, kept her warm, and prevented any ne’er-do-wells from turning her into anything she didn’t want to be.

Over the previous two decades Kelham Island has transformed from a neglected industrial area grappling with its decline into a modern residential neighbourhood saturated with bars, venues, and eateries. It still holds on to some of its edge - the Arctic Monkeys song When the Sun Goes Down still somewhat accurately describes the back streets.

While all of this is going on, fireplace sales are in decline, and the Norton family is edging out of the game. In 2025 we took on the lease.

Breathing life back into this space has been as rewarding as it has been infuriating, and 18 months in we’re not done with her renovation yet. We’ve thrown everything we could get our hands on into the project, and tried to retain her charms where possible. Honestly, at times I’ve regretted taking on a building of this nature - quirky, old, damp, difficult - but every time I see Nick and Thomas in here I’m reminded of what a space like this can mean to this city, and to the people who were born and raised here.

It’s fit for purpose, not “fit as fuck”, but its location and legacy make it feel like the perfect place for us to be doing what we’re doing.

What we’re doing is roasting the highest-quality, responsibly sourced speciality coffee in Sheffield, with passion, precision and cutting-edge technology, and on a scale that makes a tangible difference to the supply chain we rely on, then going down the hill to The Gardeners Rest to celebrate.

Sheffield, thank you, it’s you.