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 Post subject: Save Portland Works
PostPosted: Tue Mar 01, 2011 2:03 pm 
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Hawleytastic!
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I thought there was a thread already on here but I can't find it.

Anyhow it seems that the flat developer knobheads are still persisting in trying to get hold of this..

Petition, sign please - http://www.gopetition.com/petition/43409.html

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PostPosted: Tue Mar 01, 2011 2:18 pm 
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This ones burning - I signed then looked at the petition and a further four signatures had been added...


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PostPosted: Fri Mar 11, 2011 4:15 pm 
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Thank you so much for posting this! To introduce myself, I am the petition author and a member of the Portland Works campaign. :*: Thanks to people like you, we now have over 1100 signatures on the petition to save Portland Works. I am hoping that we have done enough to get the attention of Richard Hawley, aka Mr Sheffield! Richard- we are struggling to raise awareness of our campaign to save this place, and we desperately need the help of famous Sheffielders like you, who love this place and its culture, to endorse our campaign!

I'm going to start by saying a bit about why I personally love the building. This isn't said as a campaign member, but as someone who lives in Sheffield and loves it here and who feels passionately about saving this place. I have no financial or personal connection to the Works, and no personal interest in saving it, other than the fact that I think that, in a really fundamental way, it epitomizes something special about this city. To convert it to bedsits wouldn't just mean losing jobs, businesses, and skills - it would mean losing a piece of the city's soul.

It's hard for me to convey on the internet just what the place is like for those of you that haven't been and live a distance away. It's such an evocative, atmospheric place, you see. But I can start by explaining what it isn't.

If there's an absolute antithesis to Portland Works, then that complete opposite would be an Apple product. Don't get me wrong, I also love those sleek grey aluminium boxes, with their effortless interfaces, their utterly clean design, and their satisfying little details. But these are products that are entirely about interface - they are engineered so any workings are cleanly hidden away beyond the reach of any but the most technologically able. Hell, half the time I feel guilty even touching them because I leave fingerprints all over the immaculately polished surface, disturbing their pristine and perfect modernity with my messy humanity. There's no traces of their manufacture anywhere to be seen.

When you look around you, Apple are just the tip of the iceberg. Things have been trending this way for some time. We're increasingly following an aesthetic that is a little bit corporate, that aims to control in quite severe ways the manner in which we interact with our technology and our environment. Whereas you used to be able to fix your car engine yourself with a two quid spanner, now you need to take it to a garage, who will plug it into a laptop containing incredibly expensive software and adjust its settings. Whereas our cities used to be places at a human scale, now they're increasingly full of huge, prestige skyscrapers, all shiny steel and glass, the kind of architecture that some people have described as 'hyperreal'. You see it in New York, in London, in Manchester.... and virtually nowhere in Sheffield.

Sheffield is much dirtier, more dilapidated, less pristine, more quirky and individual. Portland Works embraces that. The type of business and innovation at Portland Works is the very opposite of the clinical world of Apple. It's a place of mess and dirt, of levers and gears, of wheels and ratchets, where people get inside the dirty, oily, messy workings of things. But this is also an aesthetic that's profoundly enabling, because it encourages people to tinker, to try to solve problems for themselves, to be creative and inventive, and to get their own hands dirty instead of calling a helpline where they're left on hold listening to piped music for half an hour before someone tells them to try turning it off and turning it back on again.

For that very reason, Portland works represents a different type of innovation, a different type of engineering, a new set of possibilities for young people wanting interesting and dignified work. For instance, there's a guy called Stu, who makes knives. But these are no ordinary knives! They're things of razor-sharp beauty, handcrafted from Damascus steel, married to handles made of fossilized mammoth tooth. Then there's Mark the master welder, who makes pegs for schoolchildrens' coats - but to his own innovative design which he has patented. His invention's as brightly coloured as a sweetshop, and as clever as anything - each rack has a rail to protect kids' heads from harm, the design ensures that, however much they're shaken, the coats won't fall on the floor. In his spare time, Mark teaches welding to a bunch of artists who occupy students across the courtyard on the other side of the building, often to the sound of local musicians rehearsing in the studios underneath his workshop. The Works isn't just about individual people doing their thing - it's a highly skilled community that is fundamentally collaborative, enterprising, local, and sustainable.

However, all of this is under threat. A developer wants to buy the Works and turn it into dozens of tiny bedsits. Many of these businesses can't relocate - so if Portland Works was closed, we'd lose them, their jobs, and their skills, possibly forever. That would be a personal tragedy for many. But it would also be a disaster for Sheffield. Because, as I hope I've explained, this place is the beating heart of a strong, dark, northern, Henderson's Relishey, steampunky culture, that offers far more of a future to the people of the city than load more tiny, dark flats can.

We are therefore fighting the planning application that the developer has put forward, and we're lucky enough to have a team of experts and academics on board to help.

However, we don't just want to defeat the planning application and leave the building to rot. We have a solid, viable alternative plan for the site! We want to restore its Grade II* listed architecture to its former glory. We want to provide more workshops, for more flourishing businesses and more young musicians. We want to put in educational materials for local kids, and to run courses to inspire them and encourage them to think of metalworking as a career that can marry new creativity to old-fashioned skill. We want to restore the forge so metalworking can be taught again. We want a space where locals can meet for community groups.

To fund all this, we will be issuing Community Shares. They're just like real shares, in that they maintain their face value and are repayable with interest to maintain the value of the initial investment. However, instead of going to a big impersonal business, the money goes into the community, to buy the building and apply for grants to do the work that is needed. However, we are struggling to raise awareness of our cause, which is why threads like this are so helpful. We desperately need people with local profile to come forward and to be advocates for the Works, raising awareness in the local community.

Richard Hawley, please help us raise awareness of our cause. I understand if you want to know more before you decide - so why not come and have a look round the place? You will love it, I promise!

For anyone who is interested in getting more information about the Works or the share issue, we have a website at www.portlandworks.co.uk. My personal email is k.chapman@sheffield.ac.uk if anyone would like to chat about the project. Thanks for your time!


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PostPosted: Fri Mar 11, 2011 11:03 pm 
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Good luck with your campaign. It is a worthy cause.

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PostPosted: Sat Mar 12, 2011 1:33 am 
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I've signed the petition. I'm not from Sheffield, but I realise, from reading the information here, & looking at the website, that The Portland Works & the craftsmen & women therein, embodies everything I hold dear, regard as worthwhile, & respect. Skills & knowledge that should be valued but so often are sneered at in this brittle plastic world. Like most folks I have a moderate amount of bleeping bits of technology around me, but also have some personal knowledge of that other world, the 'proper' stuff. It's always been a great sadness to me that, through a few bits of circumstance, I never got to be more deeply involved in it. So I wish the campaign all the luck it deserves.

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PostPosted: Mon Mar 14, 2011 11:00 am 
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Just wanted to say a huge thank you for your support and your words of encouragement. Every signature we collect makes a difference, and the more we can spread the word about the Works the easier it will be to save this remarkable place.

No word from Mr Hawley himself yet - if anyone can prod him for me and get his attention for this thread, I would be hugely grateful!


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PostPosted: Mon Mar 14, 2011 11:49 am 
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sorry for the late reply i am really busy with a project that takes up the whole of my mind,i am not very good at this multi tasking lark.....anyway i am way ahead of you in one respect i have spoken to a couple of my journalist friends in local papers and they are all aware of the situation as i am.I agree totally with keeping Portland works out of developers hands and keeping it in the hands of Sheffield people and folks who give a shit about our rapidly vanishing history.I like many Sheffielders are in despair about the lack of any sort of care or actual plan.....apart from"yes you can convert this fantastic old landmark into worthless shitty flats that will largely stay empty and unsold Mr Developer..here you go,smash away"....its a sign of the times,but one good thing about the economic stuff thats going on is it has slowed a lot of it down which gives folks like yourself time to gather support and momentum,for the record i fully support any efforts to save this wonderful building from the greedy grasping hands of bastards who don't care.....i can reword that if you like so you can use it as a quote as swearing is good fun and it is occasionally big and clever but not much good if your trying to battle the more genteel folks of the world.....can you put a link up to the petition please?I haven't signed it as my e-mail address is publicly visable if i do and i have enough trouble with fuck wits on the internet as it is so apologies there but i have got a lot of mates to sign it so hope that makes up for it......thanks and best wishes

Richard x

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 Post subject: Re: Save Portland Works
PostPosted: Mon Mar 14, 2011 11:58 pm 
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Hawleytastic!
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snapper wrote:
I thought there was a thread already on here but I can't find it.

Anyhow it seems that the flat developer knobheads are still persisting in trying to get hold of this..

Petition, sign please - http://www.gopetition.com/petition/43409.html


Here is the link. :)

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