Visit Sheffield with Anita Waller and #OneHotSummer! Read Anita’s blog for our #GreatBookishRoadTrip 📚
One Hot Summer is set in an area in the south east of Sheffield; a beautiful area that gives an instant impression of green. In the fifties Sheffield embarked on a slum clearance programme, and huge estates were built, with every home enjoying back and front gardens that had never been available to tenants who had lived in the back-to-backs and the tiny slum houses close to the city centre. And they kept the greenery. The whole area is filled with trees and green spaces, and is a wonderful place to live.
Sheffield, of course, is an industrial city of some magnitude. A visit to the Kelham Island Museum will teach you a lot about why this city was so perfect for making steel, and cutlery. It is also a city of music – Pulp, Arctic Monkeys, The Human League, Def Leppard to name but a few.
And just to top all of this, everything is set within the beautiful frame of the Peak District. Within a five minute drive of where I live, I am in spectacular countryside, filled with hills, valleys, beautiful meandering rivers, tiny villages, and Teashops! A big shout out for the Derbyshire Teashops!
The city, like Rome, is built on seven hills, and many small businesses here use Seven Hills in their company name. We have five rivers, Don, Sheaf, Porter, Rivelin and Loxley.
So why set most of my twenty-one novels here? The answer lies above. It is a city of diversity and from the second you walk out of the train station you are blown away by the massive steel water feature, that stretches the full length of the road outside the station. The Park Hill flats, built in the fifties and newly renovated to provide luxury accommodation with a brilliant view of the entire city centre, are very visible and pleasing to the eye, and this is all within one minute of your arrival here.
This is my home and has been for seventy-six years.
It is also the home of Sheffield Wednesday FC. Oh, and a red and white team. The blue and white team (Up the Owls) feature in many of my novels, because football is a huge part of living here. Enjoy this beautiful city through my eyes, but better still visit it! – Anita
