Lost Rivers of Sheffield: A Film Retrospective at SDW

Beneath the Surface

Sheffield is a city built on rivers. Five of them — the Don, the Sheaf, the Rivelin, the Loxley and the Porter — run through it, though you would not always know. Over centuries, many tributaries and smaller watercourses have been culverted, diverted or simply built over. The Lost Rivers screening at Sheffield Design Week 2015 traced these hidden waterways through film.

The documentary combined archival footage, contemporary filming and interviews with local historians and hydrologists. It was not a polished production in the conventional sense — more of a considered visual essay — but its argument was compelling. The rivers that flow beneath Sheffield’s streets continue to shape the city in ways that most residents never consider.

Water as Design Force

What struck me about the film was its emphasis on rivers as active agents in the city’s design. Street layouts follow former watercourses. Basements flood where underground streams persist. The topography that gives Sheffield its distinctive hilly character is, fundamentally, a product of water erosion over millennia.

The post-screening discussion extended this theme into contemporary planning. Several audience members raised the 2007 floods, which had demonstrated with devastating clarity that Sheffield’s hidden rivers cannot be permanently ignored. A hydrologist in the audience described the challenge of designing for water in a city that has spent two centuries trying to make water invisible.

Hidden Histories

Lost Rivers connected to a broader thread within Sheffield Design Week’s programming — the idea of revealing the city to itself. The Crucible Cellars tour from the previous year had explored hidden industrial spaces, while the Castlegate Festival the following year would propose restoring the River Sheaf to the surface.

For anyone interested in Sheffield’s relationship with its geography, this screening remains an important document. The industrial past and the natural landscape are more intertwined than the city’s contemporary surface suggests.