Spartan Works has been empty since 2011, but it isn’t quiet. Old buildings never really are — they creak, they settle, they hold onto old pipework and older decisions. Before we bring this one back to life on Attercliffe Road, we went inside to see what it’s been holding onto, and what a century and a half of Sheffield history looks like up close.

Attercliffe’s story starts long before industry got hold of it. The area gets a mention in the Domesday Book, and for centuries after that it was orchards, a windmill, pleasure gardens, lakes – a place people went to for leisure, not labour. That changed hard and fast in the mid-19th century, when Sheffield’s steel trade exploded and Attercliffe became one of the engine rooms of a city that was busy building a global reputation. Furnaces, forges and works like this one replaced the gardens. The pleasure ground became the workshop of the world.

The building itself has gone by more than one name. It started life as Shipman’s before an American buyer took it on and rebranded it Spartan Steel Alloys, rolling steel here that had been produced at Spartan’s Birmingham site. A 1984 management buyout kept it going, but the workforce was cut hard in the process. By 1998 the whole operation had been sold to Firth Rixson, and within a year production had shifted out to Ecclesfield, taking most of the jobs with it. What was left behind cycled through storage, offices, security firm HQ – and then, since 2011, nothing. Just the building, waiting.

That’s the version of Spartan Works we entered: not a ruin exactly, but a place where every decade left something behind and nobody came back to clear it away.

The staircase is where the building still shows its original ambition. Dark, dense timber, tongue-and-groove panelling gone amber with age, a run of turned balusters catching the light against a wall of heavily embossed Anaglypta. This was built to impress – a works office stair, not a factory corridor. Whoever specified it wanted visitors to know this was a serious operation.

Further in, the building admits it’s lived more than one life. A curved, dark-veneered canopy and a wall of bold 1970s geometric wallpaper in ochre, brown, cream, running in tight repeating arcs. This is the Spartan Works of its second act: post-war industry giving way to office culture, hard graft giving way to swirl-patterned optimism. It’s brash. It’s a bit much. We love it.

This isn’t heritage as decoration – it’s the actual, unpolished record of a place that made things, remade itself, and got left behind by an industry that moved on without it. Attercliffe Waterside is where we’re picking that story back up: new, high performance homes going into and around buildings like this one, a footbridge reconnecting the site across the Sheffield and Tinsley Canal, the iconic blue Spartan Works frontage staying put as the neighbourhood grows around it.

We’re not smoothing this history out. We’re building on top of it – the staircases, the wallpaper, the stained glass and all.