A frightful piece of waste ground…

One particular picture of Sheffield stays by me.  A frightful piece of waste ground (somehow, up here a piece of waste ground attains a squalor that would be impossible even in London), trampled quite bare of grass and littered with newspaper, old saucepans etc.  To the right an isolated row of gaunt four room houses, dark red, blackened by smoke.  To the left an interminable vista of factory chimneys, chimney behind chimney, fading away into a dim blackish haze.  Behind me a railway embankment made from the slag of furnaces.  In front, across the piece of waste ground, a cubical building of dingy red and yellow brick, with the sign, ‘John Grocock, Haulage Contractor’.

George Orwell describes his visit to Sheffield in March 1936.