In 600AD Anglo Saxons arrived beside the River Sheaf, one of four rivers that have subsequently helped shape Sheffield as an industrial centre. The Anglo-Saxons called their new home Scafeld and it grew into a sizeable settlement but it was not until the late 12th century that it came to note.

Its reputation for cutlery manufacture dates from this early medieval period and a surviving tax return for a Sheffield man known as Robert the Cutler. By the 1570s, when Mary Queen of Scots was incarcerated in Sheffield Castle, almost the entire population was employed in the fashioning of hard-wearing knives and other tools. Only fifty years later, Sheffield was granted the right by Parliament to establish minimum quality standards for their industry and to regulate the training of apprentices and the Cutlers Company was formed in 1624.

A century later, following the invention of Sheffield Plate, Sheffield produced nearly all the cutlery and tools in England and was perfectly poised to take full advantage of the Industrial Revolution. Technological advances, plus the creation of essential canal and railway links, turned the town into an intensive manufacturing and distribution centre for superior tools and cutlery. Its population swelled and it was granted city status in 1893.

The city’s concentration of steel mills and engineering plants made it an obvious target during WW2 and it suffered heaving bombing in 1940. Worse was to come in the second half of the 20th century, however, when both the steel and coal industries fell into decline. Having become the fourth largest city in the UK, Sheffield had one of the nation’s highest rates of unemployment during the 1980s and early 1990s but both the city and steel production have since revived.