asdfgghghgThe Sheffield that rolls alongside The Full Monty’s opening credits is a city of industry and clean air, hard work and culture, discotheques and football. “Thanks to steel,” the voiceover tells us, “Sheffield really is a city on the move.”
These were the boom years. The rolling mills and forges employed around 90,000 of the city’s half-a-million population. In the city centre, the “Hole in the Road” (or Castle Square, as it was officially known), with its subterranean passageways, escalators and tropical aquarium, embodied a city looking towards a rosy future.
But that was 1971 and the promotional film, Sheffield: City on the Move. Fast forward more than a quarter of a century, as The Full Monty does, and many of those earlier jobs have been lost. The Hole in the Road has been filled in. It’s these redundancies that underpin The Full Monty’s plot, catalysing Gaz, Horse, and the rest of the lads’ decision to, as one man in Shiregreen Working MThe worst of the steel-related lay-offs were already old news by 1997. A regeneration bid in the form of the 1991 World Student Games had been intended to shake a still-dazed Sheffield back into action, and instil a strong sporting culture in this region. By the time of the film six years afterward, sporting facilities such as the Sheffield Arena, Don Valley Stadium (the floodlights of which can been seen in the back of the canal scene shot), Hillsborough Leisure Centre and the Ponds Forge complex, all built for the student games, had long since waved goodbye to the young competitors – but Sheffield taxpayers were, and still are, footing the bill. The overall cost of £658m will, according to Sheffield Council, be repaid at the rate of £25m a year until 2024.
en’s Club puts it, “get their cloth off”.
