Professor Vanessa Toulmin has spent a decade shaping how Sheffield sees its own culture. This year, she’s stepping back. Episode three of REYT. Independent Sheffield Podcast is out now, and she’s the guest.
Who is Professor Vanessa Toulmin?
Vanessa is Director of City Culture and Public Engagement at the University of Sheffield, founder of the National Fairgrounds and Circus Archive, and the person behind Festival of the Mind, Off The Shelf and Phlegm’s Mausoleum of the Giants exhibition. If you’ve queued for any of Sheffield’s biggest cultural moments over the last decade, there’s a good chance she was behind it.
She didn’t come to culture through the usual route. She grew with her family’s fairground in Morecambe. She left it behind for archaeology, working digs in Ireland and France, before her uncle Arthur’s death changed the direction of her career entirely. She turned the tools of cultural anthropology on her own family’s history, and out of that came the National Fairgrounds and Circus Archive, built from a life she’d actually lived. In 2007 she became the first person at any British university to hold a chair in early film and popular entertainment.
Keeping Sheffield’s culture alive without a council behind it
In the episode she talks through what happened after Sheffield lost its original City of Culture bid and the council decided culture wasn’t going to be a priority. Rather than watch the sector shrink, Vanessa and a network of cultural organisations across the university and the city spent the best part of a decade keeping things running without institutional backing, work she describes simply as “always keeping it warm.”
The Mausoleum of the Giants
Sheffield street artist Phlegm spent three months building a secret installation inside an old cutlery works. Almost nobody knew it was happening. When it opened, 14,000 people came through the doors, with queues stretching four hours down Milton Street. Vanessa managed the volunteers, the crowd, and the sheer scale of a secret art project suddenly becoming the thing everyone in Sheffield was talking about. “It was just so Sheffield,” she says, “so organic, but so amazing.”
Why is Vanessa Toulmin stepping down?
Vanessa continues to chair the Sheffield Heritage Partnership Board and remains involved in her charity work restoring the Grade II* listed Morecambe Winter Gardens. After delivering Off The Shelf and Festival of the Mind one final time this year, she’s stepping down from events delivery at the University of Sheffield to return to academic life full-time.
Sum Up Sheffield, Straight Outta Sheffield, and REYT. Good Recommendations
Every REYT. episode includes three regular features.
Asked to Sum Up Sheffield, Vanessa lands on the city’s people: it has the best people in the world, it knows how to work together, and it doesn’t need to be Manchester, Leeds or Birmingham to matter.
For her Straight Outta Sheffield moment, she recalls finding an original Sheffield bus roll sign in an antiques shop in Austin, Texas during South by Southwest, buying it, and bringing it home to donate to The Forum.
And her REYT. Good Recommendations: The Punchbowl in Crookes for a pub, Gusto’s for food (ravioli scampi, every time), Collard Manson as her independent shop pick after twenty years of buying her wardrobe there, tending her garden and seeing friends as her favourite thing to do, and Abbeydale Picture House as her Sheffield hidden gem, one of the largest cinemas in the UK when it was built.
What REYT. is
If you’re new here: REYT. is Sheffield Forum’s independent podcast. Every episode, a guest sits down for a proper, unscripted conversation about Sheffield. No PR lines, no script, no agenda. Just an honest hour with the people building, shaping and occasionally arguing about this city. Sheffield Guide is in the process of joining forces with Sheffield Forum, and REYT. is something we’re building together.
Listen to the full episode
You can watch and listen on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Amazon Music, or find the full episode page, show notes and discussion thread at sheffieldforum.co.uk/episodes/professor-vanessa-toulmin-university-of-sheffield-farigrounds-festivals-mausoleum-giants.
Follow REYT. Independent Sheffield Podcast to get new episodes in your feed as soon as they land.
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