Details
784-1/0/10092 ARUNDEL STREET
30-MAR-07 151
Sellers Wheel
GV II
Cutlery works comprising offices, warehouse, and workshops, with grinding rooms (or hulls), now joinery works and retail warehouse. Later C19. Brick, painted, with slate roofs and brick stacks.
PLAN: Rectangular courtyard plan, with ranges on all four sides.
EXTERIOR: Front range to Arundel Street, former office and warehouse: Three storeys, ten bays wide. One ridge stack and gable stack to right. Stone-capped plinth. Cart entrance in eighth bay from left, north-east end, with segmental head and flanking stone pilasters supporting an entablature. Flanking the cart entrance are two pedestrian doorways with plain stone surrounds (that in the seventh bay now partially blocked to form a window), with an inserted doorway (formerly a window) in second bay. Modern doors. Rectangular windows with brick flat-arch heads and stone sills to ground floor. Continuous stone sill bands to first and second floors, with rectangular windows, similar but shorter to second floor, with brick flat-arch heads, apart from bay above cart entrance which has tripartite windows with plain stone surrounds, divided by stone mullions. 12-pane sashes to ground and first floors, 9-pane sashes to second floor. Second-floor window in seventh bay from left is blind. Modern external shutters to ground-floor windows. Return to Brown Lane: Sill bands continue. Two 12-panes sashes to first floor and two 9-pane sashes to second floor. South-west return blind (apart from two high-level ventilators plus one modern one at low level).
South-west return workshop wing: Reduces in height from three to two storeys and then to a single storey, with stack at latter junction. Blind rear wall, monopitch roof. Courtyard elevation has two-light and three-light casement windows with segmental brick heads, and a segmental-headed doorway to the left of the two-storey section.
North-east workshop range to Brown Lane: Three storeys (originally four, but reduced in height), sixteen bays wide to second floor. Stack at junction with front range. Ground floor has a series of cast-iron ventilation grilles, with stone sills and segmental brick heads (indicating the location of grinding hulls): three survive unaltered, four are blocked and two have been lengthened into single-light windows. Doorway inserted below grille at left. The final bay to the left has a window with stone sill and semi-circular brick head, perhaps indicating former position of an engine. The left-hand (eastern) half of the first floor has a series of five similar ventilation grilles, similarly indicating the position of grinding hulls. The right-hand (western) half of the first floor has eight two-light windows (the easternmost now blocked) with 10-pane timber casements, segmental brick heads, and a continuous stone sill. Second floor has sixteen similar windows above a continuous stone sill, slightly irregularly spaced, with three-light windows in bays one, two, seven and eight from the left. Courtyard elevation has eaves stacks, two-light and three-light windows with segmental brick heads above continuous stone sills at all three levels. Segmental-headed doorways into grinding hulls, the upper reached by external stair. Vehicular entrance with part-glazed double doors probably a later insertion.
South-east range: Original range to rear of yard replaced by tall single-storey range, probably early C20.
INTERIOR: Fireproof construction with cast-iron columns and beams supporting shallow brick-arched vaulting to former grinding hulls. Traces of outline of grinding troughs on floor surface of first floor, with evidence of line shafting along the rear wall.
HISTORY: Occupied by the firm John Sellers and Sons, manufacturers of pen and pocket knives, razors, table cutlery, and electro-plated goods, from c.1893 into the C20. Map evidence reveals that in 1896 the south-east, rear range comprised a steam power plant, and forge shops, now replaced.
SOURCES: `One Great Workshop': The Buildings of the Sheffield Metal Trades', English Heritage (February 2000, unpublished analysis of research), `One Great Workshop': The Buildings of the Sheffield Metal Trades' (2001), Sellers Wheel, 151 Arundel Street, Sheffield NBR Index No.98281, 1998.
SUMMARY OF IMPORTANCE
Sellers Wheel is a medium-sized, purpose-built cutlery works built in the late C19. It was identified as being of special architectural and historic interest by English Heritage during a thematic survey undertaken to assess the best surviving examples of buildings associated with Sheffield's metal manufacturing and metal working trades. Against the loss of many such buildings in the late C20 due to the severe decline of the industry, Sellers Wheel is an important survivor. It demonstrates the layout and building types of such a complex, being particularly significant for the retention of evidence of grinding hulls in the north-east workshop range, an extremely rare survival of a building housing a specific process, rather than the more generic space of cutlers' workshops. There are probably only around eight sites in Sheffield retaining physical evidence of grinding.
Sellers Wheel also has strong Group Value with other significant C19 works complexes in this city centre location, and together with them characterises the distinctive industrial landscape created in C19 Sheffield by the city's metal trades, which were at this time of international significance.
