To begin with, I want to give full credit to @haych for seeing a legit way in here, getting in and being generous enough to share this info. Muuuuuch appreciated.
I visited here with @Esoteric Eric, as an unexpected prelude to an already organised and long overdue meeting in one of Sheffield's finest hostalries. The light was already fading when I arrived, so my photos were pretty rushed to take advantage of the day’s last remaining sun.
Chimo are one of six remaining cutlers in Sheffield. White Rose Works was their premises from 1994 - 2020, after they relocated to a building elsewhere in the city (also now called ‘White Rose Works’) in March 2020. This factory building was built in 1947 but it is soon to be replaced by... student flats.
You can read more of the history of Chimo Holdings here: https://chimoholdings.com/our-history/
There’s a video here from Canadian children's TV explaining how cutlery is made, shot inside the building if you want to see two cartoon robots describing how cutlery is made whilst also seeing how this place looked when it was operational.
Wandering round the very empty building we initially felt that we had missed a trick here, but finding out that the company had moved rather than closed reassured us that we probably hadn’t actually missed any genuine opportunities to see machines in situ. In pre-pandemic times this would have been part of my standard wandering route, but working from home this past year has meant I’ve not poked around this area much recently. The building is internally covered in PIRs which are obviously now disabled, even though power is still connected (albeit without working lights, which would have helped with this early evening rush round to take photos). Given that this place has only been vacated a year, it’s amazing how established the new pigeon shaped inhabitants have already become.
We poked about in pretty much every cupboard, corner and top shelf looking for hidden treasure but it had been very thoroughly cleared. Nevertheless, there were enough posters, signs and bits of cutlers paraphernalia - including some royally embossed cutlery handles - dotted about to make this work a close look. Really nice to have to opportunity to see another one of Sheffield’s select ambient workspaces before its gets flattened for the ever expanding student population of Sheffield. Cheers again to @haych.
I’ll start with some film photos and then switch to phone pics for the second bit.
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