Image Details

7thWave AI Assistant

For several years, I've completed a Writing Challenge with many people all over the globe. We write something inspired by prompts for 21 days, plus an introduction. This year, the prompts are about place, and I've chosen the River Porter in Sheffield.  These posts touch upon the river's history but they're also about what it means to me.  I'm not following the river in any order except that the first 10 posts are about the Porter Valley and the second 10 posts are about the Porter in the city.  I hope readers will participate and I have a couple of challenges; see the paragraphs in bold towards the end.

Standing at the bridge over the Porter on Matilda Street, you see this stretch of the river.  I wonder how many times I walked this way and didn’t notice?  If I glanced this way, it was just a river.  At this stage, near the end of the Porter’s journey, I found it hard to distinguish the Porter from the Sheaf, the river into which the Porter flows.

So, let’s pause on this bridge and reflect on what we see.  I remember in the 1990s, we visited a silversmith on Matilda Street.  Industry gathered around Sheffield’s rivers, which offered a source of water and power and a means to dispose of waste.  Perhaps not so much waste from a silversmith.  I remember they had grills in the floor, with a tray beneath.  Any silver dropped would fall through the grill and into the tray from which it could be recovered. 

Sheffield is perhaps not so well known for its silverwork but it should be.  Perhaps the most famous name is Thomas Boulsover, who invented electroplating to produce cheap silverware.  He has a monument at Wiremill Dam.  Sheffield also has an assay office in Hillsborough. 

The silversmith showed us his work – beautiful and eccentric!  At that time, they had many requests from leaders of oil-rich countries in the Middle East.  They liked silver models of their possessions, eg ships and planes.  The one that sticks in my mind was a silver gatehouse.  It included the guard’s lodge, the pole you lift to allow a car through and even a circle, a roundabout engraved in the silver roadway.  I wonder where that is now …

As far as I can tell, the nearest wheel to Matilda Street was the Cinderhill Wheel, a corn mill.  There is a weir somewhere, which I haven’t found, that fed the head goyt for the dam. 

Let’s put this all together.  How many people walking along Matilda Street notice the river and name it?  How many are aware of the old Cinderhill Wheel?  Or of the silversmiths working in the area?

For many years, I was unaware of these things.  I walked around not noticing until I started to ask questions, like: Which river is this?  I can trace the Porter now, although I sometimes find new sections tucked away around corners, on the far sides of car parks, emerging briefly into daylight and then disappearing into darkness. 

Perhaps it takes a lifetime to learn to look, to ask questions.  Why is this building like this?  How old is it?  What’s going on beneath my feet?  Where the hell has this river gone?  And what do you do with a silver gatehouse?  (My guess is it’s in a cupboard, long forgotten.)

How might posts of this type be used for marketing?  Think about how you might use this post or a post like it to promote your business.  I add a few thoughts after each post, like this:

Like all of these posts about the Porter, there's a sub-theme.  The Porter Valley is very familiar to me, from my earliest memories.  The Porter in the city is another matter.  A river I have discovered in recent years.  And yet, all these discoveries are at the same time familiar.  I know all these places and have recently pieced together the river that connects them.

This theme of not noticing familiar things is crucially important for marketing.  You may have a solution to a common problem but your market will not respond if they don't know they have a problem.  For example, if you have an effective weight-loss programme, you'll soon find many people are unaware they are overweight.  Stories about finding the familiar can be very effective.

My other challenge is for Sheffielders.  Do you have anything to share about the Porter?  Your experiences along it, bits and pieces of history you've uncovered, folklore you've heard?  If you remember something, please share it in the comments.  (Or maybe you are more familiar with other rivers in Sheffield, you could share those too.)  Let's see what we can find out over the coming weeks.

This is the eleventh of 21 stories about the Porter.  The last story was: Going With The Flow.  The next is: Metaphor, Companion, Palimpsest.

This is the Porter looking upstream from the bridge on Matilda Street.

This photo is of the bridge that Matilda Street passes over.  The first photo was taken from across the road.