‘You can feel it’: South Yorkshire revival gathers pace as new industries move in

It has seen its fair share of Hollywood parties – albeit with a twist. Instead of champagne and caviar it is usually Guinness and scampi fries. Red carpet? There aren’t even cushions on the seats.
The tiny Sheffield pub, Fagan’s, has raised more than a few toasts in the last year as Adolescence, the Netflix hit made by two of its owners, scooped multiple awards at the Emmys and Golden Globes and became one of the world’s most-watched dramas.
A year after the drama’s release, Sheffield appears to be basking in a newfound confidence.
“It feels like we’re on the cusp of something really exciting,” said Neil Shamma, the chief operating officer of Warp Films, the production company behind Adolescence.
Shamma is not the only one excited. The former steel city is now home to the UK’s biggest podcast festival, Crossed Wires, as well as the genre’s leading independent producer, Persephonica, which makes Lily Allen’s show with Miquita Oliver, Political Currency with Ed Balls and George Osborne, and launched The News Agents with Emily Maitlis.
Dino Sofos, the former BBC News podcast boss who runs Persephonica, said the success of Adolescence – Netflix’s second most-watched show of all time – had transformed South Yorkshire’s creative scene: “Between Arctic Monkeys and a few years ago it’s been nostalgia driven. What’s great about Adolescence is that we’re proud of what we’re doing now.”
Civic leaders all say South Yorkshire has for years punched below its weight creatively and economically, notwithstanding the success of Arctic Monkeys (two of whom co-own Fagan’s).
The region struggled to recover from the brutal dismantling of its heavy industry and missed out as money and jobs flowed to Manchester and Leeds.
Oliver Coppard, the Labour mayor of South Yorkshire, said its leaders had failed to offer an ambitious vision of the area’s future: “There was never a moment where someone stood up and said: ‘And now we’re going to move on.’ We’ve been shit at that. That sense of renewal never came.”
For the first time in decades, he said, there is optimism about South Yorkshire’s future: “You can feel it. It’s palpable.”
In Westminster, government ministers are now taking the region seriously. Rachel Reeves mentioned the area in her Mais lecture last week, pledging to transform the former coalfields into a “modern industrial heartland in manufacturing and defence”.
Jon Healey, the defence secretary and a South Yorkshire MP, last year opened Britain’s newest weapons factory in Sheffield, where BAE Systems makes M777 howitzers destined for Ukraine.
Nearby, Sheffield Forgemasters, which was bailed out by taxpayers in 2021, produces steel for submarines.
More controversially, a firm that supplies parts for F-35 fighter jets, used by Israel among others, has a site near Meadowhall shopping centre. Protesters claim to have shut down the factory twice last year.
Jim O’Neill, the former Treasury minister and one of Britain’s leading economists, hailed the region’s turnaround as “inspiring”, comparing it to Manchester when it started taking off nearly a decade ago.
O’Neill, who sits on Coppard’s advisory board, points to the growth of Barnsley and Doncaster, two of the UK’s fastest growing cities economically according to research published in January.
He cautioned, however, that South Yorkshire could not rest its future solely on bombs and blockbusters.
“It’s a great gift for South Yorkshire in the near term [but] the mood can change so dramatically on these things,” he said
“It’s not entirely obvious to me a decade from now it will be so fashionable to think we need to boost defence spending.”
Coppard, who was elected in 2022, will next week unveil plans to bring thousands of jobs and new homes to the Don Valley corridor, the UK’s first investment region, which links Sheffield to Rotherham.
His plans include the former Orgreave site, where striking miners faced brutal policing in 1984, and now hosts Rolls-Royce, Mclaren and Boeing’s only European manufacturing facility.
The proof of South Yorkshire’s success, though, will only become clear in years to come. It relies on the area’s young people choosing to stay in the region for high-skilled jobs and, crucially, a public transport system that can get them to work on time.
There is still some way to go on that: apprentices at the Advanced Manufacturing Park, where Boeing, Rolls-Royce and Mclaren are based, are often allowed a nap in the afternoon because they need to get up at 4am to catch a bus in time for work.
Mark Herbert, the Conisbrough-born chief executive of Warp Films, said the region would not get carried away on its Hollywood success: “My nan will literally go: ‘When are you gonna get yourself a proper job?’”
Shamma said it was not just older relatives who raise an eyebrow about a career in showbiz. It was also “the elders of the city”, he said.
“They think that if it’s not involving a furnace or steel or a factory it doesn’t count. That’s a battle we’re all fighting and I think we’re winning.”