Butchers Wheel

Butchers Wheel, Sheffield

A steel and cutlery works comprising interconnected workshop blocks arranged around a square courtyard, dating from circa 1835 and circa 1875. The buildings are constructed in brick with stone dressings and slate roofs with various stacks.

The complex occupies three separate street addresses: No. 72 Butchers Wheel and Arundel Street, No. 41 Eyre Lane, and No. 30 Brown Lane.

The Arundel Street frontage presents four storeys with thirty segment-headed 2-light glazing bar casements on each floor, with irregularly spaced blanked windows. The ground floor features a cart entrance with rusticated stone surround, keystone and cornice, and double board doors, flanked to the right by a round-arched pedestrian entrance. To the right of this are seven round-headed cast-iron glazing bar casements, and to the left, two similar windows followed by two segment-headed 3-light wooden cross casements.

The Brown Lane return comprises a four-storey block with seventeen windows on the first floor (five segment-headed 2-light casements followed by a smaller window at lower level and three altered segment-headed windows). The second floor contains five segment-headed casements, a 2-light casement at lower level, three flat-headed 3-light casements and eight 3-light casements. The third floor repeats this pattern with five segment-headed casements, a single window, and six plain sashes. The ground floor has two plain sashes to the left, a small casement set higher, a large boarded up window, then five small windows with a door below the left one. To the right stands a gable with three large glazing bar casements on each floor and a door below. Beyond this, a slightly recessed two-storey bay contains a 3-light casement and below it a double board loading door with cast-iron fanlight.

The Eyre Lane rear elevation comprises three main sections. To the left stands a circa 1835 block of three storeys with eight windows per floor, primarily glazing bar sashes with some later reglazed panes. The ground floor features a central elliptical arched doorway with keystone and rusticated surround, flanked to the left by four sashes and to the right by two sashes, another similar doorway with blocked window and twentieth-century door insertion. To the right of this section stands a mid-nineteenth-century four-storey block with four windows per floor: the first floor contains four large segment-headed casements flanked to the left by a smaller window, with four similar windows above and four smaller segment-headed windows on the third floor.

The courtyard front range features sillbands to the upper floors and 3-light casements to the first floor with 2-light casements above, all with segmental heads. An external wooden stair provides access to a first floor door.

The left side of the courtyard contains a nineteenth-century four-storey block spanning eleven windows. Sillbands ornament the upper floors. The first floor displays pairs of 3-light windows alternating with smaller 2-light windows, all with radial fanlights (the smaller windows lighting internal staircases). The second floor has four large 3-light cross casements to the left, a smaller 2-light casement, then four larger 3-light casements, two with fanlights. The third floor contains nineteen smaller 2-light casements, many later reglazed, some with fanlights.

The right side of the courtyard comprises a circa 1870 four-storey block spanning nine windows. Segment-headed wooden casements are arranged in groups of three, with the central window of the left group blocked. Upper floors follow similar fenestration with smaller windows. The third floor contains six large plain sashes. In front of this block stands an earlier nineteenth-century block, set forward, of three storeys with five windows per floor (the first floor has four glazing bar sashes with the left one covered by an adjoining building and the third blocked; the second floor has five similar sashes, the left one reglazed).

The irregular rear elevation comprises blocks of four and three storeys with single windows to the left. In the centre rises a three-storey gable-facing projection. In front of this stands a tapered round factory chimney, linked by a curved wall to the buildings to the right. Originally, a communal boiler house supplied steam power to the workshops around the yard, apparently by belts and pulleys on the outside walls. This system was replaced by electric power in the 1950s.

The ground floor of the west block contains brick elliptical arches on round cast-iron columns, and stone dogleg stairs with hoist trapdoors in the landings.

Butchers Wheel represents an important example of the courtyard workshops characteristic of Sheffield. It was designed for the manufacture of cutlery, and some cutlery processes are still carried out on the site.