Joe Scarborough
Thoughts on the future of Burngreave The building on the right, on Ellesmere Road, used to be the library in Burngreave. When a new library was built on Spital Hill, it became the Al Rahman mosque © Picture Sheffield, Sheffield Libraries That idea of rock and roll and the new styles, kids don't wear hand-me-downs from fathers anymore and they don't look like their fathers anymore. Every generation is brand new and it's like Pitsmoor, not so much Pitsmoor, its Burngreave. Burngreave is now the home of Somalis, people from the Yemen, and all like that, and they have yet to make Burngreave and Pitsmoor. They're still transient but their stamp on it is only just being laid, and in fifty years time it will be totally normal. Like the time when I was in Pitsmoor to work in the steel works was just normal. Before then it was the railway workers. Now my forebears came out of Lincolnshire, as indeed many people did in Pitsmoor, their roots are in Lincolnshire. When the big estates failed in some thing like 1848, something like that, a lot of agricultural workers came over to Pitsmoor or Woodside, as it was, and Parkwood Springs. Extract from an interview with Joe Scarborough recorded by Gaby Spinks for the Burngreave Voices oral history archive, July 2006. |