One of the biggest success stories to spring from Sheffield is the
musician Richard Hawley. As I’m an old fossil and don’t sit comfortably into
modern life I like his retro-sound. His fourth album Coles Corner comfortingly follows the template of previous albums –
unapologetic flavours of loss, regret, love’s lament, homesickness and romance.
On the front cover Richard is standing at Coles Corner which was a famous
Sheffield meeting point for shoppers and courting couples. In daylight hours
shoppers met there every o clock or half past and then in dark hours it was
usually lovers. The Coles Brothers department store stood there, selling high
quality goods over many floors - the Harrods of Sheffield. In 1909 the store started employing women and by 1911 Coles
delivery vans would be seen all over the city dropping off purchases. In 1916
they started using the first cash registers in the city. Business was so
healthy they built upward in in 1920, adding two storeys. In the same year the
business was sold to retail king Gordon Selfridge. It never got bombed in World
War Two.
I didn’t know of Coles Corner until I saw the album cover so I thought
I’d see if I could find it. I’d been searching for the grave of a famous fat
goalkeeper in Burngreave Cemetery (found it). The cemetery looks across the
city scape so when I came out of the gates I just pointed my car at the city
centre and set off. I parked on a featureless side street, plopped a £1 coin in
a metre and had thirty minutes to find the corner. I sprinted though a subway
and up into the centre of Sheffield. It was Saturday afternoon and the squares
were thronging with Christmas shoppers. It’s a big busy city so I didn’t know
how close I was to the corner. A man with a tray of chips and his back to a
wall assumed mild dread in his eyes as I approached him (I know I’m scruffy but
surely I don’t look like I’m going to beg for money.)
“Coles Corner please dude?”
He jabbed a chip on a plastic fork down the way and I found it about a
quarter of mile away (I must have looked suspicious on the CCTV cameras as I
ran all the way.) I soon found it a white building dying in its own monumental
blandness. The album cover was in my brain and it showed an Art-Deco building
with cosy lighting but there’s nothing like that there now. Bum.
The local Rotary Club had paid for a “Coles Corner” plaque to be
mounted but it would be more fitting for it to say “Something Of High Quality
Stood Here Once – Now Look At This Turd.”
I wandered around the Christmas markets I was heartened by so many
old-fashioned traditional buildings putting modern edifices to shame. I saw a
red K6 telephone box which still worked (60 pence minimum call – I can chat to
Ting-Tong in Thailand for ten minutes for 40 pence.) These days Coles Corner is
better known as an area than a building. I got back to the car with three
minutes left on the clock. There were no Gestapo-dressed parking attendants
about so I had a coffee, a slab of carrot cake and a bit of ABBA.
Update
Please scroll down to see the actual place in
Scarborough where the photograph for the album cover was taken. It's outside
the Stephen Joseph’s theatre. The highly successful Alan Ayckbourn
lives nearby and tries out lots of his plays here before they go to London and
the rest of the world. The photos were taken in July 2020 but this beautiful
building is ageless and it pretty much looks the same all the time anyway.
Stephen
Joseph's theatre, Scarborough