Castlegate Commons

Year: 2023

Client: Sheffield City Council

The site of Sheffield Castle is the focus of current development work by Sheffield City Council to re-establish Castlegate as a vital part of the city centre. The River Sheaf will be deculverted and a new public park will soon be built on the site. Since the demolition of the Castle Markets in 2015 active grassroots campaigns have formed to advocate for the site's heritage, biodiversity and community engagement. At the same time, a rich network of independent creative organisations and businesses have taken the initiative on the ground, activating empty buildings and streets to create a vibrant DIY quarter for the arts, music, skating, culture, festivals and food. 

The Castlegate Commons project created a vision for new community facilities to sit at the heart, both physically and metaphorically, of the Castle site. This new ‘commons’ aims to draw out the extraordinary potential of this unique site, and its rich creative, historic and community context. Castlegate Commons will enhance the use of the existing historic buildings that edge the new park and help to set the agenda for longer-term development on and around the site. 

The students worked with local stakeholders to create a vision for Castlegate Commons:

• a welcoming, engaging and creative place - shared by the many diverse communities in and around Castlegate

• a dynamic place for events, playing, performance - that changes through the year according to season, weather, occasion

• an inclusive place that engages visitors to the site in conversations and activities around climate, heritage, arts & culture, health and wellbeing

The work produced by the students formed an inspiring springboard for a new co-design design project, with local stakeholders, facilitated by Live Works. The aim of this new phase of co-production is to develop the spatial brief of Castlegate Commons further and to form a new community group that can own and operate the new facilities

with and on behalf of local communities.

In collaboration with: Sheffield City Council, Friends of Sheffield Castle, SADACCA, Andalus Community Centre, Exchange Street Collective, Sheaf and Porter Rivers Trust

Mentor: Carolyn Butterworth

Students: Luke Alcock, Andrew Chadwick, Mihaela Constantinescu, Barnaby Dulley, Yu Gan, Yuming Guo, Jingyi Lai, Ellen McCann, William McKinney, Luca Philo, Florence Pond