3.2 Urban Form and City Skyline

Tall Buildings in Sheffield

The city centre contains few buildings which are greater than 13 storeys in height. Most of the buildings this height are housing tower blocks located around the city centre periphery. Generally these buildings have been designed in a slender skyscraper form. The exception to this is the massive slab form of the Hallamshire Hospital.

Many buildings in the 9-12 storey height range have a large floor plan to height ratio, such as the Government Offices building, the West One development, the Park Hill flats and the Sheffield Hallam University building.

Plotting the location and height of taller buildings in Sheffield, on the map opposite, has shown that:

• The extent of the footprint of buildings in the 5-12 storey range is often substantial. In some instances it encompasses most of a city block, such as West One or the Government Offices.
  
• The building footprints often do not respect the underlying street pattern. This is particularly evident within the Cathedral Quarter where modern structures have consumed large tracts of the intricate medieval street network.
  
• Most of the tall structures plotted are located above the 75m contour level.
  
• Tall structures have not been clustered within a confined section of the city centre. Rather, they are randomly dispersed throughout the city centre and outlying suburbs.

Full advantage has not been taken of the city’s dramatic topography by way of considered siting and design of tall buildings. The clustering of tall buildings within the lowest points of the city has served to flatten its silhouette and diminish its defining topographical features.

Potentially, tall buildings could be used to highlight the unique topography of Sheffield.

This can be seen in the siting of the Martin Street flats. Here the building forms are tall and slender and their arrangement sees them stepping down the hill as a group of related structures. As the only tall structures in the vicinity, they stand out and define the topography.

The buildings which dominate Sheffield’s skyline are uniform in design and appearance. Most are of a typically nondescript utilitarian design - block form, square profile and grid fenestration. Many have been designed as elongated, slab like forms, with a profile that is squat, rather than tall. Services such as lift overruns or antennas are often visible on the roofs.

These larger buildings do not always integrate well with the surrounding context. Ground floor uses do not engage street level activity and in some instances blank facades are presented to pedestrians. Design forms and detail at the base of buildings is often not in keeping with the pedestrian scale environment.

In addition to the location, height, scale and mass of a building, other factors will have a significant influence on its potential impact, principally:

• its use, and how this relates to other uses in the locality;
  
• how the building ‘touches the ground’;
  
• the architectural quality of the building.

you can click on the plan key for an enlarge version, this will open in a new browser window.

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