The Olympic torch will be travelling through the streets of Sheffield in June. The exact route of the relay was announced this morning.

It’ll be coming through Chapeltown at 4:45pm on Monday 25th June and there’ll be activities and events taking place throughout the day before the torch arrives.

A family fun day is taking place in Hillsborough Park where people can have a go at different Olympic and Paralympic sports.

Sheffield City Council are hoping this will encourage communities to come out and celebrate the torch coming through this city. And the Olympics coming to London this summer.

Sheffield is one of the cities to have the torch overnight. It’ll be staying over night in a secure location and on Tuesday morning will leave from Don Valley Stadium where it’ll go onto Rotherham, Doncaster and then Cleethorpes.

It’s route ends with another celebration outside City Hall in Barker’s Pool.

Earlier today I spoke with Olympic torchbearers, Hannah Daykin and Leah Wren, as well as the 2012 Delivery Manager, Ben Brailsford, about the torch coming to South Yorkshire.

Temporary traffic signals will operate this week on Sandygate Road near the Coldwell Lane junction

From Tuesday to Friday this week a set of temporary traffic signals will operate on Sandygate Road near the junction of Coldwell Lane.

The lights are being installed to allow for gas works to take place.

Sheffield city council – general roadworks

Freiburg: Sonnenschiff - Sustainable homes and employment space

Public Lecture by Prof. Wulf Daseking, Head of Urban Planning, City of Freiburg followed by discussion (Friday 16 March 4pm – 6pm Peak Lecture Theatre , Sheffield Hallam University)

Freiberg in South Germany is often cited as Europe’s ‘greenest city’ for sustainability with extensive low-energy housing, a strong commitment to use of renewable energy and very high use of public transport, walking and cycling built from a compact, city with a beautiful historic core.  It also enjoys a very strong economy based in part on solar power and an enviable quality of life which attracts talented people to study and work.  How has this been achieved and what can business and local government in the Sheffield Region learn from it?

Wulf Daseking has been the Head of Urban Planning for the City of Freiburg since 1984 and is a key figure in shaping the city. He is also an entertaining and persuasive speaker  on the social and economic benefits of planning for a low carbon future.  He will describe the experience of Freiburg and introduce the Freiburg Charter – which has distilled the lessons of its experience and how they can be relevant to others.

Representatives of the Council, Sheffield Civic Trust, Academy of Urbanism and the Universities will be invited to respond before throwing the floor open to general questions and discussion in what promises to be an inspirational and highly informative event.

Friday 16th March 4 .00 – 6.00 pm

Peak Lecture Theatre, Sheffield Hallam University, Howard St

Discussion chaired by Professor Brian Evans: Mckintosh School of Art, Glasgow

FREE ADMISSION with refreshments after.

Presented by Sheffield Urban Think-Tank:

Sponsored by: Sheffield City Council, Sheffield City Region Local Enterprise Partnership, Universities of Sheffield and Hallam, Sheffield Civic Trust, South Yorkshire Forest & Integreat Plus.

For more information on the project follow this link:

https://www.sheffield.gov.uk/planning-and-city-development/regeneration/neighbourhood-regeneration/your-neighbourhood/parson-cross/chaucer-district-centre/chaucer-public-art-project.html

Yes, you read right. Do not adjust your screens folks. After over 11 rollercoaster years of being a sole trader [journalist > copywriter > blogger > PR > social media consultant. Phew!] I’m thrilled to announce I have been appointed in a full time permanent job, which begins next month.

My new role is Social Media and Content Manager of Patient.co.uk – already one of the most trusted online medical information and support websites in the UK. Exciting changes and developments are ahead for this brand in 2012 and beyond.

My base remains here in wonderful Sheffield and over the next few weeks I’ll be revamping and removing the ‘business’ aspect to this site – turning it back into its original incarnation as a lifestyle blog, created just for fun & hopefully to inspire, inform and entertain.

I anticipate I’ll be sharing my thoughts/ideas/photos focused on my interests, including food, culture, Sheffield life, plus now and then I’ll talk about branding, social media, the art of storytelling in communications et al.

So this isn’t really a goodbye post…just a THANK YOU to everyone, whether you’re a current or former client, collaborator, like-minded business, fellow media or creative type, for supporting me and my business in so many ways.

In future, I’ll still be tweeting under @stellamedia. Plus, I’ll continue to provide social media content for the Sheffield Culture, under my freelance role for Sheffield City Council.

So don’t forget to keep me posted on any cultural/creative/sport etc info that’s Sheffield-related to me by emailing: culture@welcometosheffield.co.uk, tweeting news to @sheffculture [or sharing with the Twitter community via #sheffculture] or posting relevant info on the ‘Sheffield City of Culture’ Facebook page.

Farewell for now dear readers…and see you on the other side! ;0

Certification to BS8901: One of our major clients – a leading live events company – successfully achieved BS8901 (the standard for sustainable event management). By working closely together with the client we created an integrated management system that built on existing business processes.  We are even proud to report that the assessor described the approach as exemplary.

Sustainability assessment completed for the UK’s largest outdoors event: Undertaking an audit of this fantastic event was one of our highlights – the output not only showed what great things they were already doing but our cost benefit analysis showed areas for improvements and other opportunities that look set to make next year’s event even better.

Supplier engagement: Sheffield City Council asked us to develop guidance and simple actions that suppliers could take to improve their sustainable impact at council events.  Our user-friendly guidance was applauded and we hope to see the results in 2012.

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Art and design
Northern England‘s art scene thrives as developers withdraw
Cheap studio space helps to foster growth in Sheffield and create a buzz throughout the region

Alex Needham
The Guardian, Fri 30 Dec 2011 18.53 GMT

In a building that has variously been a pub, a factory and offices in Sheffield’s Devonshire quarter, 15 young artists have put on a group exhibition. As the rain hammers down on the corrugated iron roof, sculptures made of broken glass or parts from enormous metal film projectors wink through the gloom.
This is S1 Artspace, the hub of the burgeoning art scene in the Steel City, which now has the most artists’ studios outside London according to statistics from visual arts advocacy group All Points North.

At S1, 22 artists show and make work, sharing the space with commercial clients such as the city’s famous graphic design studio Designers Republic. Upstairs on a mezzanine are a collection of studios that can be hired for as little as £62 a month.
There are pots of paints on every surface, brightly coloured lumps of plaster, two cold lava lamps and even a disused organ. These items belong to Haroon Mirza, 34, who won this year’s Northern Art Prize, participated in the touring British Art Show, and overcame being mocked on regional TV news programme Look North to scoop the Silver Lion at the Venice Biennale. Next month, he stages a solo show at Spike Island in Bristol.
Born in London, Mirza has been based in the city for five years. “Somehow being in Sheffield made me more visible than being in London,” he says. “There it’s saturated in terms of how many artists there are. Here I can concentrate and actually make work.”
Mirza says Sheffield’s industrial past makes it ideal for artists. “It’s cheap and easy to source materials,” he says. “There are still a lot of places that produce and manufacture things like steel and glass.”
At S1, few of the studios have doors. On Sundays, says 24-year-old artist Emily Musgrave many of the artists get together to critique each other’s work. “There’s a lot of communication and dialogue,” says Mirza. “It’s got a cross–over between an art school and a commercial art space.”
Pre-credit crunch, the building would have been too expensive for the artists to take over. It was earmarked for demolition to make way for flats, but the developers pulled out. “The recession has been great for us,” admits artistic director Louise Hutchinson, who says the building was almost entirely refurbished by the artists themselves for £10,000 from fundraisers and the Arts Council.
The buzz from Sheffield’s art scene has echoed around the rest of the region. When the Hepworth Wakefield gallery opened in May, artist Antony Gormley predicted it would become “a place of pilgrimage for all lovers of sculpture.” Seven months on, it has had more than 350,000 visitors, double the number predicted for one year.
Spanish artist Jaume Plensa’s retrospective at the nearby Yorkshire Sculpture Park was its most successful exhibition ever, with a 40% increase in visitor numbers, up 100,000 from 2010.
Despite a backdrop of cuts, it’s not just Yorkshire that’s looking back at a landmark year for the arts, but the whole of the north of England. The Turner Prize, which moved from Tate Britain in London to Baltic in Gateshead, attracted more than 122,000 visitors, 40,000 more than the previous year (although free admission clearly helped). In July, the Manchester international festival (Mif) debuted new work by artists including Björk, Victoria Wood and performance art doyenne Marina Abramović to an audience of 230,000, while Durham’s Lumiere light festival in November attracted 150,000 people to light sculptures which transformed the city centre.
Mif director Alex Poots says the seeds for northern England’s arts boom were sown in the 1980s, when Tony Wilson’s Factory records proved you could do “something outside London that was every bit as good as what was going on in that or any capital in the world”.
Poots credits Gormley’s Angel of the North, unveiled near Gateshead in 1998, the Baltic and the National Theatre of Scotland with paving the way for the Mif, together with the city’s “can do” attitude: “If you asked for a live bull on stage because Matthew Barney needed one, they’d say ‘We’ll find a way of making that happen’.”
Laura Sillars, director of Sheffield’s Site gallery and founder of All Points North, says: “Tate Liverpool’s only been there 20 years, Baltic 10, Nima [in Middlesborough] five. But there’s this whole infrastructure that’s developed that really supports the sector in difficult times.”
Arts institutions faced particular funding challenges this year, as regional development agency funds fell away and many companies lost some or all of their Arts Council funding. Many projects that came to fruition this year were commissioned long before the credit crunch – Hepworth Wakefield took 10 years – and Arts Council England made it clear last month that its capital programme of lottery money for 2012-15 would be only spent on maintaining existing arts venues. Next year brings the danger that local councils might reduce their arts funding – even to the extremes of Somerset, which cut its entire direct grants to the arts last November.
Yet Sillars says that with Arts Council funding set for the next three years, and the awareness that any other money will have to be raised themselves, arts institutions at least know where they stand. “You either forge ahead, rethink who you are and grow, or you just die.”
Next year, the Cultural Olympiad will mean new works across the region, from Anthony McCall‘s column of mist rising from the Liverpool skyline to Flow, a floating building on the Tyne.
Work by Bradford-born David Hockney will be displayed across the north in a “Hockney trail” timed to coincide with the artist’s retrospective at the Royal Academy in London.
According to Poots, reduced funds means that co-commissioning with partners around the world is crucial: in 2009, this brought Mif £700,000, rising to £2.3m in 2011. “People need to share more because there is less money going around – it’s actually one of the positive outcomes of austerity. Rather than people being very insular about work they make, they’re being much more generous-spirited in terms of working more collaboratively across different festivals and art houses and opera houses.” He has now taken an additional job as artistic director of the Armory in New York.
Sillars says past investment in the north has left a network strong enough to withstand austerity. “There’s a lot more career progression of artists and arts professionals. You could easily have started your career in Northumbria doing a fine art degree and then done a museums course in Manchester, an internship at the Manchester international festival, then worked at the Liverpool biennial, then the Baltic. The networks now are very robust, so people know each other and they can help each other. The scene is strong enough to weather the storm.”
Hutchinson adds that as well as artists, theatremakers such as Tim Etchells’s Forced Entertainment have figured out that they can pursue their work outside London while enjoying a lifestyle, and proximity to their studios, that they wouldn’t be able to afford in the capital.
“Things have really changed in Sheffield,” says Mirza. “Instead of moving to London, people study at Sheffield Hallam and then stay in the city. These days, artists are even moving here from London.” And with rents of £62 a month, it’s not surprising.NORTHERN ARTS SIDEBAR
The best of 2011
Turner prize at the Baltic
“This year, the show is being staged not at Tate Britain but the Baltic, and the improvement in the way the art is displayed is like the difference between night and day”
Richard Dorment, Telegraph
Hepworth Wakefield
“Chipperfield’s building would surely have appealed to [Hepworth's] sensibilities. From a distance, its cast concrete facade is pristine and rectilinear, but up close, its painted surface echoes the plaster prototypes inside.”
Rebecca Rose, Financial Times
Bjork’s Biophilia at Manchester international festival
“A a ritual dance between the head-scratchingly abstruse and the heart-warmingly simple.”
Kitty Empire, The Observer
What to watch out for in 2012
Anthony McCall, Column
Part of the programme for the Cultural Olympiad, this will see a column of cloud rising from the water in Merseyside, visible on a clear day from 60 miles away
Sea Odyssey
In April, a giant puppet show will take to the streets of Liverpool inspired by the story of the Titanic, in a show that promises to be on the scale of the Sultan’s Elephant, which caused a sensation in London six years ago
The Way of the World
The Sheffield Crucible hopes to continue its hot streak with this production of Congreve’s dense restoration comedy starring Fiona Shaw
Related
Art and design

Related articles

• Turner Prize and our friends in the North (independent.co.uk)
• Art Practice in a Social Context – SYMPOSIUM (steffanjoneshughes.wordpress.com)
• Northern Art Prize, Leeds: November 2011- January 2012 (steffanjoneshughes.wordpress.com)
• Arts Council’s third Flashback tour puts artist Gary Hume in spotlight (guardian.co.uk)
• Turner Prize exhibits go on show (bbc.co.uk)
• Turner Prize to be awarded in Gateshead’s Baltic (rombizco.wordpress.com)

Green Party Cllr Jillian Creasy urges council to congratulate protesters

Sheffield Green Party is calling for Sheffield City Council to congratulate Occupy Sheffield and their right to protest. A motion is set to go to the council this Wednesday.

Sheffield Green Party wants councillors to show support for the campers by personally going down to the camp, which is outside the Cathedral, and visiting their website.

The motion calls for councillors to recognise the Occupy Sheffield camp as part of a global movement and “not simply a protest” but part of “a worldwide occupation.”

Cllr Jullian Creasy says: “I think for mainstream politicians, it’s actually very challenging and disturbing to have a group that says ‘you say you do these things but you don’t’.”

Regarding the Occupy Sheffield protest, Paul Blomfield, Labour Central MP, says “We need a more responsible economy and the Occupy protests are part of the debate about how we achieve this.
“I welcome peaceful protest on these issues, but hope that the important work of Sheffield Cathedral, particularly with the homeless, won’t be affected.”

The Occupy Sheffield camp has been there for a month and is growing in size. They have daily meetings as a camp. And have been meeting with the church leaders to discuss their demands.

IT Club has enjoyed it’s 5th successful session, with numbers steadily rising from 8 attendees at the first session to 17 at yesterday’s…  Volunteers are growing week by week as well, with three people now committing to attend regularly to assist members  with skills using email, web based publishing sites and reading.  As the activity develops the evidence of the need for  it is mounting up -so it seems like a good time to answer the question – IT Club –  why do it..?

On 11th September 2011 RASAG held it’s second “Happy Eid For Everyone” party, pictured above.   The majority of the budget was used on food making sure that there was a wide selection of dishes from around the world, freshly cooked with “whole food” ingredients, all suitable for our majority Muslim membership…  The party was open for everyone in the community and we aimed to cater for the enjoyment of a born and bred white Sheffielder, just as much as for a person or family from a different culture.

Our main intention in organising an event as a refugee/asylum seeker group, is to ensure that it is accessible to the hardest to reach people, including those who through the workings of the UK asylum system have been made destitute with no legal status to allow them to work and no recourse to public funds.  Good food, good music and the certainty of a friendly welcome all ensure that our parties are accommodating to someone living in enforced destitution.  Thanks to RASAG teaming up with the welcoming organisation Sheffield City of Sanctuary, “Happy Eid…” enjoyed a fabulous turnout of almost 200 people – African Arabic , Asian and Persian dishes were enjoyed alongside the sounds of DJ Ebo, and Shangra band Yakam Jar Bu – people danced, and laughed and were merry – even the tinned fruit and ice cream dessert was received with rapturous enthusiasm!  To the untrained eye the old school hall was the picture of affable comradery, but from RASAG’s p.o.v, the people who couldn’t raise a single smile, who’s foot never tapped to the beat and who didn’t exchange a word in sociablity were the only ones who mattered and they were dotted throughout the room like shadows in every corner.  Which raised the question – as a group, is it enough to simply afford a welcome to those most in need at occasional gatherings?  If the best we can do as a community group is provide a jolly a few times a year, are we really doing anything at all?  So IT Club was born.

The idea is very simple – four hours of high speed internet access on 11 PC’s, a box of additional resources including Flip cameras, ESL textbooks, dictionaries etc, a shared hot lunch and a small amount of petty cash to reimburse travel expenses for unwaged participants and volunteers – oh and printing is free with the room by default, although the line did have to be drawn when someone wanted to print a whole book!  There is no pressure  for people to prescribe to a specific line of learning, and in fact those who come along expecting a structured IT lesson are quickly put right.  The shared blog space (http://rasagcomputerclub.wordpress.com/) and encouragement to use email, Youtube, facebook and Twitter alongside learning basic IT skills, such as log on, shut down, highlight, double click, make IT Club more like a conversation club online.  Just like Sheffield’s highly successful conversation clubs, IT Club is not only open to refugees and asylum seekers, but to everyone who wants to talk and share, forming a community.

That’s what we’re doing – and we’re going to keep doing IT.

Customer First! Training for Council Staff

Sheffield City Council have embarked on a programme of Customer Service training for their staff at their walk-in centre (First Point) and at their centralised telephone contact centre.

Crucible Learning and Development are proud to have been awarded the contract to deliver this training, which has included Understanding Communication Styles, Listening Skills, Telephone Skills, Body Language recognition, Workplace Coaching to Improve Performance, and First Line Supervisor Skills.

We continue to work with the Council to expand this programme into other service areas.

We are proud to be working with Sheffield City Council to enhance the skills of their staff in providing

excellent service to the citizens of Sheffield.

Sheffield is one of England’s largest cities and a metropolitan borough in South Yorkshire, England. It gained its city charter in 1893 and officially became titled the City of Sheffield.

With a population of 555,000, the City of Sheffield is England’s third largest metropolitan authority and the fourth largest City outside London.

The city has two universities – the University of Sheffield and Sheffield Hallam University – with over 61,300 students.

Free internet access is thankfully on the rise, but when so many of us are connected at home and out and about on smart phones, wireless devices and WiFi it’s hard to imagine having to make an appointment to get an hour online. Having secured one’s hour at a library, community learning space or similar, the task of logging onto the system and navigating away from the homepage is likely to take a sizeable chunk out of the designated time. Even for the most seasoned cyber surfer under an hour will be at best a couple of emails, bit of a nosey on facebook and possibly some gentle Youtubing. Or of course if there are serious tasks to be done, you could perhaps search for and download the details of a job or two, investigate your car insurance or plan a journey. So what about people who don’t know how to set up an email account, or use Google or open a programme?

With thanks to Sheffield City Council’s now closed Small Grants fund RASAG has been running an IT club on Mondays,11 – 3 at Sharrow Old Junior School. The grant which we received in March enables us to hire the IT Training Suite (£25 p/h), to buy a small amount of teaching resources and to refund bus fares to qualifying participants, ie. those who are unwaged or entirely without income. Thanks to an element of match funding from the Community Forum, we are also able to provide a hot lunch. The combination of transport assistance and food makes us an ideal facility for anyone who does not have personal internet access and who is on a tight budget.

RASAG IT Club is open for everyone, whether they’ve never switched a PC on in their life or they’re written an encyclopaedia on computer engineering. The four hour time slot means that anyone who attends is able to secure a meaningful amount of time online and have free use of a printer. All IT clubbers are encouraged to help each other out and if they are not in need of help themselves, they will certainly find they are able to help others. Top priorities include getting everyone set up on an email account and using this and other medium as a form of communication; a simple example of this would be new email users exchanging messages with each other. Today we established a group blog and six IT clubbers are authors so far, see http://rasagcomputerclub.wordpress.com/

Literacy is the greatest barrier to learner progression and enjoyment at IT Club, so reading support is the key need within the group. If a person is literate in any language, they will be able to use a computer and may have ESL needs that can be addressed with online activities. However, if the person cannot read any language, then ESL activities will not help them to use a computer. The relaxed and friendly atmosphere at the IT Club ensures that everyone gets a chance to try new things, learn and practice new skills and meet people who learn in different ways and all have something to teach.

Some of the things that have proved to be important to IT Club goers so far include having access to music and videos from other cultures, using email, facebook, twitter and other platforms to communicate with people and being able to download job applications, funding applications and print coursework and formal letters. It’s so satisfying to see facilities being used and enjoyed, and a wide variety of people gaining substantial benefit from them. Viva IT Club!

We have constituted ourselves as a voluntary organisation and have got good support from a range of committed individuals and organisations. These include:

Management Committee

• Mark Gamsu (Chair) – Visiting Professor Leeds Met
• Keith Crawshaw (Treasurer) – Leisure Consultant
• Maire McCarthy (Secretary) -  Festivals and Events Organiser
• Sue Bullivant -  (MLS)
• Pauline Eveleigh – (Festivals Consultant)
• Sara Unwin – (Arts Management & Festivals)
• Bill Newby – Dancer – Sheffield Tango Argentin0
• Emily Hutchinson – Sheffield Theatres
• Jenny Murphy – Dancer – Belrobics
• Ron Day – South Riding Folk Arts Network – Dancer – Triskele Sword
• Jenny Day – Dancer – Triskele Sword

Advisory Members:

• Trisha Cooper – BBC Broadcaster, Producer & Media Consultant
• Sarah Nickson – Activity Sheffield
• Rachael Hall – Activity Sheffield
• Amy Elkington – Sponsorship & Marketing Consultant

Group Members / Supporters -  (so far….)

• Nisha Lall  -Dancer – AimtoDanceandCreate
• Anna Olejnicki – Dancer – Hype Dance
• Errol Barrows  -  Dance Professional

We will now be focussed on raising money to ensure that Chance to Dance returns on 30th JUNE 2012.

If you would like to help us – particularly with fundraising please contact us on our ‘who we are’ page.

Mark Gamsu – Chair

Photo by Tracey Welch: http://www.traceywelch.co.uk/

How much does your environment affect your well-being, both professionally and personally? It’s a question that’s been at the forefront of my mind recently and I’ve concluded the space I’m in, really makes a massive difference to my outlook and frame of mind.

Over the last month, my reasoning about this has been put to the test and proved absolutely right, because I’ve already felt the incredibly positive benefits of working from a new professional base – the dynamic, state-of-the-art hub for creative and digital industries and arguably one of the most prestigious business addresses in Sheffield, Electric Works, at Sheffield Digital Campus.

As a Club Member at Electric Works, I enjoy 24 hour, 7-day access to the open-plan and wonderfully-quirky plug-in-and-work facilities, hot desking Club Lounge, as well as free use of the uber-smart meeting rooms weekday evenings and weekends. It’s a space to work, interact with other creative professionals, meet clients and business associates, all right from the heart of the city.

This week, I was thrilled to hear the news that Electric Works had scooped a coveted accolade, when it was named winner of the British Council for Offices [BCO] national Innovation Award.

It’s the first time this award has been won in Sheffield and the BCO commended Electric Works not only for its impressive architectural designs, but also for its programmes of interaction between its occupiers.

On top of this, the BCO commented on the growth of Sheffield’s creative, digital and technology sectors, praising Electric Works for being at the centre of these developments, and for the wide variety of flexible services it offers to freelancers, sole traders and larger businesses.

Since working here, I’ve made no secret of the fact I’m relishing my new surroundings. So when Electric Works set about promoting their win, I was asked to represent the Club Members in a publicity photo shoot with Tim Cooper, of Team Cooper, also stepping up to the PR plate, as one of the resident businesses here.

Here I am pictured above, in the Coconut Lounge area of the building [I’m second left] with:

Tim Cooper [second right], Toby Hyam, Joint Founder and Managing Director of Creative Space Management, who manage Electric Works, [far right] Paul Taylor, Joint Founder and Managing Director of Creative Space Management [far left], Electric Works Centre Manager, Louise Jamieson [third left] and, from Sheffield City Council, Cllr. Helen Mirfin-Boukouris [third right].

Congratulations EW for your well-deserved win!

To read more about this BCO awards win click here

Or check out the full story on the Electric Works blog here

Back in the 1890s, it was a very radical idea indeed to think of preserving the land and buildings for everyone; this was the age of the great Victorian land-owners, with their palatial house in ‘Town’ (London, that is) for use during ‘the season’ (a decreed round of social events, balls, etc.), their ‘family seat’ in the country, where they lived for the rest of the year, and, possibly, a ‘shooting lodge’ – really, an expansive country house, surrounded by its own estate, where many types of game were ‘preserved’ for shooting parties.  The thought that any member of the burgeoning middle classes, or, heaven forbid, one of the workers would be allowed to even enjoy the views, and be given access to the land, would have shocked the average member of the Victorian gentry.

Amazingly, that is just what happened. In 1894, ‘The National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty’ came into being in England, Wales and Northern Ireland (there is a separate National Trust for Scotland, due to that country having a completely different legal system to the other member nations of the United Kingdom). The National Trust was formed by a few well-intentioned individuals, who appealed for funds and bequests of land and property for their newly created body; The National Trust Act of 1907 and several other Acts of Parliament regularised the position and activities of the Trust.

The aim of the National Trust is to ‘….to look after places of historic interest or natural beauty, permanently, for the benefit of the nation across England, Wales and Northern Ireland.’ Today, people tend to think in terms of castles or large country houses when they think of National Trust properties, but in reality, the range of property that the Trust holds is vast. There are beaches and beautiful stretches of coastline, castles and country houses, gardens and the most magnificent countryside. It is hardly surprised that the Trust would be heavily involved in the Peak District; it owns significant areas of land inside the National Park, as well as historic houses and other properties.

Here we see a National Trust trailer, on their Longshaw Estate in the Derbyshire Peak District. Longshaw is a very beautiful area of moorland and heavily wooded gorges, complete with prehistoric burial cairns, and the ruins of Mediaeval cottages. The Shooting Lodge at the heart of the estate was built in 1827 by the then landowner, John Henry Manners, KG, 5th Duke of Rutland (1778 – 1857). Eventually, the Trust acquired 3,000 acres of the estate from Sheffield City Council (who had purchased it in 1927), and this land forms the modern-day Longshaw Estate. The Lodge is in private hands, however, although parts of it may be rented out for conferences.

National Trust trailers spread the word about the work of the Trust, and encourage visitors to join as members, as well as participating in working parties and other activities. We should always remember that the Trust preserves much of Britain’s heritage, and that no less than £130 million is donated each year (out of the more than £393 million needed) to continue the work of the Trust, ‘for ever, for everyone’.

Sheffield city council on Twitter

The council’s approach to Twitter has come a long since its fledgling first steps where #almost #every #word #was #inexplicably #hashtagged. They seem to have got the hang of it now and have certainly discovered its value, particularly during times of crisis such as our occasional floods.

I was thinking about how they might further improve what they are doing and for me the username they have chosen, ‘SCCPressOffice‘, is not very good. You might hope that after being on Twitter for a year or two, they would realise that the could change it to a name which would work for them much more effectively.

Here’s why Sheffield city council needs to change their SCCPressOffice Twitter username:

• It doesn’t contain the name of the organisation that it is supposed to represent
  Sheffield city council is called Sheffield city council, and none of those words are included in the name. Instead, they have chosen to use an abbreviation that no member of the public would really choose of using (SCC) and also the name of the department providing the tweets. To me, this seems quite inward-looking: why base your name on meaningless local government internal jargon and the name of an internal department? By all means use your Twitter biography to explain who is running the account on behalf of the organisation, but not your username
• It doesn’t contain the name of the city it is supposed to represent
  The council’s primary interest, and the reason it exists, is the city of Sheffield. Although it may not always be demonstrated with swagger, the people who live here love their city and have plenty of civic pride. Why wouldn’t the council choose to include the word Sheffield when representing itself online?
• It doesn’t help search engine optimisation
  When choosing names for things like this, it is good to pick a name that is also the kind of thing that people will put into Google or the Twitter search box to look for it. Who on earth would search for SCCPressOffice? Perhaps someone wanting to get in touch with the press office. But everyone else would type ‘Sheffield council’ or ‘Sheffield city council’
• It doesn’t read very well
  I’ve got used to it now, but to someone unfamiliar with the name, SCCPressOffice doesn’t scan very well and isn’t particularly easy to read. Their Twitter biography also doesn’t make sense: “Sheffield City Council, Sheffield where everyone matters”
• It isn’t really on-brand
  I’m guessing that the council doesn’t have a very developed set of brand guidelines. If it did, referring to itself externally as SCC would surely not be encouraged

It seems to me that when setting up this Twitter account the council has made the classic mistake of naming it based on the internal set-up of the organisation, instead of their audience’s needs. As I said, few people call the council ‘SCC’ and no-one really cares that the press office update it. To the outside world, that Twitter account is Sheffield city council and the name should reflect that.

I’m not out to slag off the council or the people running the account, I just want to see the prominent users of digital services like Twitter in Sheffield use them to their maximum potential. They offer an opportunity to engage with hard-to-reach people and are a great way for the public to feed back on council services. Getting the name right is a good start and a platform on which to build.

As a footnote, the Sheffield Telegraph has also not chosen a very good Twitter username in ‘shftelegraph‘. It isn’t easy to remember what it is (I should know, as I type it every week), it doesn’t mention Sheffield or Telegraph and their Twitter name (different to username) is Sheffield Newspapers. When looking for the paper on Twitter, who would type the name of the parent group instead of the newspaper title?

Come on council and the Sheffield Telegraph: no matter how much red tape is in your organisation, the power is in your hands to make this easy change. You won’t lose any users and it can be done in two minutes. What do you say?