The changing landscape

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Today Bishops’ House is located between the suburbs of Meersbrook and Norton Lees. Now in Sheffield, these places were once part of the Derbyshire countryside. Meersbrook refers to the boundary line marked by the Mears Brook (‘meer’ being old English for boundary). This was the boundary between the kingdoms of Mercia and Northumbria, later becoming the boundary between Derbyshire and Yorkshire.

Before Victorian times Meersbrook was an area of fields leading down to the Meers Brooke rather than a settlement as such. When Bishops’ House was built people would have said the building was in Norton Lees. Norton Lees means ‘forest clearing in Norton’, with ‘Ley’ (also spelled ‘lee’ or ‘lea’) being old english for a forest clearing and ‘Norton’ meaning ‘northern settlement’. A number of Sheffield’s suburbs are similarly named, such as Heeley, Totley, Tinsley, Wadsley and Walkley.

Today Norton Lees is a suburb of similar size to the neighbouring village of Norton, but the place was little more than a cluster of buildings when Bishops’ House was built. Norton, Norton Lees and Meersbrook were all once part of the much larger area of Norton Parish, which also contained Heeley, Little London, Smithy Wood and Woodseats, as well as Bradway, Greenhill, Jordanthorpe and Hemsworth. Norton Parish became the principal area in the north of England for making sickles and scythes in the sixteenth century, and the tradition continued well into Victorian times.

Hover over the maps below to move the slider and compare the area in about 1800 with today’s map. (This rewards looking at on a larger device.. on a mobile device try tilting to landscape mode and pinch to zoom)

Below is a sequence of maps, with explanations below, showing how much the area has changed. Click the arrows to cycle through.

For the first four hundred years of its existence, Bishops’ House lay in a rural
landscape where little changed for centuries. Old maps of Woodseats, Heeley and Norton
from the 1720s to the 1740s show a completely rural area with the land divided into fields for
agriculture and only the beginnings of any villages. — For the first four hundred years of its existence, Bishops’ House lay in a rural landscape where little changed for centuries. Old maps of Woodseats, Heeley and Norton from the 1720s to the 1740s show a completely rural area with the land divided into fields for agriculture and only the beginnings of any villages.

By the middle of the nineteenth century little had changed. A few field boundaries had moved and a few farm tracks became minor roads. The Parish Church of Christ Church, Heeley was built from November 1846 and consecrated in August 1848. The primitive Methodist Chapel was built in 1858 on what was then called Sheaf Street and is now Gleadless Road. This building was the original meeting place for the Primitive Methodists. There were several local farms – Arbourthorne Farm, Ash Farm, Paddock Farm, Carrfield Farm, Cockshutts Farm, Bole Hill Farm, Cowmouth Farm, Backmoor Farm, Hemsworth Farm, Grange Farm, Lees Hall Farm and Cockshutts Farm. Many of the old farm buildings survived into the 20th century when they were demolished for modern housing estates. Water-driven mills were dotted along the River Sheaf. Bartin Wheel, Ecclesall Mill, Moscar Wheel, Norton Hammer Wheel, Smithy Wood Wheel, Little London Wheel, Heeley Corn Mill, Heeley Wheel, Heeley Tilt and, along the Meers Brook, Blyth Mill. Many of these began their working lives in the 16th or 17th centuries.

The pace of life was beginning to change. Work started on the Midland Railway to connect Sheffield to the south of England in 1864. The railway line was driven through the Sheaf Valley, obliterating many of the local water mills and opened in February 1870 along with the local Heeley Station. The first of the modern roads were laid out in Heeley by 1872 including Myrtle and Alexandra roads. By the end of the nineteenth century the area began to be built on. The modern streets of Heeley had been laid out and road building was beginning to enclose the area of Meersbrook Park. But most of the area was still rural and many of the fields that had been in use for hundreds of years were still farmed. In 1903 Meersbrook, Meersbrook Bank, Norton Lees, Norton hammer, Blackmoor, Little Norton and Norton Woodseats were added to the City of Sheffield following the Sheffield Corporation Act of 1903.

By the 1920s much of what we regard as Heeley, Norton, Meersbrook and Woodseats had been laid out as streets. Very little of the old rural landscape remained. In 1929 the three cottages next to Bishops’ House were demolished. Two big houses close to Bishops’ House, The Hollies and Thorpe House, were demolished by the early 1930s to make way for the Hollythorpe estate, built in 1934.

During the Second World War Sheffield was bombed in December 1940, hundreds of bombs landing in our area. Many local people were homeless and Anns Road Church in Heeley helped to give temporary shelter. With the building boom of the post war years more streets were laid out. But change wasn’t always one-way. The last electric tram ran in October 1960. The Meersbrook was culverted in 1957. Heeley Railway Station closed in June 1968 following the Beeching cuts to the railway system.

By the beginning of the twenty first century few places remained unfilled by streets and houses. In 1974 the occupants of Bishops’ House moved out and the building was restored, opening as a museum in 1976. In 1977 four streets in Heeley were demolished to make way for the Heeley Bypass. As we know this was never built and instead Heeley City Farm has occupied the land since 1981. In 1988 Sainsbury’s Homebase was built on the old quarry site on Chesterfield Road. The old Heeley railway sidings, once occupied by Greshams Timber Yard, was built over as Heeley Retail Park.

POPULATION

The earliest reference to Sheffield’s population that I have been able to find dates from 1571 when it was estimated at only 833 in the township with a total of 1,676 in the parish. By 1672 the township’s population had risen to 2,311 with 4,685 in the parish.

By 1700 Sheffield was still little more than the largest of a group of villages clustering in the valleys of South Yorkshire and north Derbyshire. The survey of 1736 puts the population of the town at about 10,000. By 1750 it may have exceeded 12,000 while that of the parish as a whole has been estimated at 20,000.

At the end of the eighteenth century England was a country of about eight and a half million people, at war with Napoleon Bonaparte, and George III was on the throne. Sheffield at the time was still a small town, probably no more than 1,500 m across and with only 46,000 in the Parish of whom nearly 31,500 lived in Sheffield Township and about 35,000 living in the urban, built up area. But the Industrial Revolution had begun with the invention of Crucible Steel and Sheffield Plate. The population slowly increased to 111,000 by 1841, after which there was a much sharper increase to 185,000 by 1861. The next village in towards Sheffield from Norton Lees, Heeley, had a similar slow increase in population until the middle of the 19th century, after which there was a dramatic rise. Norton Lees, by contrast, was always a small isolated rural community whose population remained broadly static at around 100, not reflecting the massive changes from the rural landscape of centuries, divided by fields and a few areas of woodland with here and there a few small scattered communities, to increasing urbanisation and industrialisation.

Apart from Bishops’ House, few other early buildings survive. The grandest house in the local area was Norton Hall, built in 1815 by Samuel Shore, and Meersbrook Hall, built in 1759 for local businessman Benjamin Roebuck.

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