United Kingdom
Case study
The Peace Gardens, Sheffield, England
Project data
Project name: Peace Gardens, Sheffield
Location: Sheffield city centre
Date completed: 1998
Cost: £5 million
Designer: Sheffield City Council
Client: Sheffield City Council
Overview
The Peace Gardens are located to the south of Sheffield Town Hall, a Victorian building (with a Grade I
conservation listing) to which an extension was added in the 1920s. The latter has a symmetrical elevation
which helped to determine the focal point for the new gardens. This takes the form of a computerised
fountain at the lowest point of the site. There has been an open space in this location since 1937 when
the abandoned church of St Paul’s was demolished to provide the site for a further Town Hall extension.
This building proposal stalled with the outbreak of the Second World War and the site was then grassed.
After the war, it became known as the Peace Gardens and flower beds were cut into the turf, but in design
terms, it was never distinguished. In the 1970s, a concrete Town Hall Extension was built on a neighbouring
site which soon became known as the ’egg-box’, an object of derision for some, but also the focus for an
inverted kind of civic pride.
By the 1990s, the old Peace Gardens had acquired an unsavoury reputation. It was mostly frequented
by the homeless and people with alcohol problems. The Heart of the City Public Realm Project aimed to
restore it to full community use. The egg-box would be demolished to provide the site for the Millennium
Galleries and the new Winter Gardens designed by architects Pringle Richards Sharratt with consulting
engineers Buro Happold. The Peace Gardens would form a welcoming, sunny and sheltered place, nestled
against the Town Hall whose architectural merits would at last be complemented.
There is a change in level of about 2m across the site. At the lowest point, aligned with the axis of the Town
Hall elevation, a dancing fountain forms the hub of the garden, which sits within a larger space known as
Town Hall Square. Along the rim of the garden at the higher level there is a stone balustrade, from which five
stone-flagged paths descend towards the principal water feature. Beside each path run water rills seemingly
fed from the spouts of large metal vessels mounted on carved circular plinths above the balustrade. The rills
are lined with highly textured leaf-like ceramic forms. In the segments separated by the radial paths there are
lawns raised by about 0.5m and retained behind bulging stone copings. The slopes behind them are richly
planted with shrubs and herbaceous material. In good weather, the grass is crowded with people sunbathing
and socialising. Although the overall layout is formal, the detailed forms of the rounded copings, the balusters
with their alternating dumb-bell and egg motifs, and the eight curvaceous urns around the perimeter give the
place an air of whimsy and seem to evoke some mysterious lost civilisation. The slightly exotic feeling of the
place is enhanced by the planting, which, though based on a traditional English garden style, includes many
architectural plants with bold foliage.
