Tucked away next to a used-car dealership, on an industrial estate a few miles from Cardiff, the whole club is like this, an echo of a lost Britain. Deep within its cave-like chamber, the players resemble wraiths, forever trapped beneath the golden pools of light that illuminate each table. When I visit, Roxette’s 1987 song “It Must Have Been Love” hums from a TV overhead, perennially tuned to a channel showcasing big-haired hitmakers. The club seems to trade in yesterday’s prices too. I seize the offer of becoming a “lifetime” member for a mere £5, only to be informed that the club has run out of membership cards. Is this how it works at Soho House?

Not that I’d have it any other way. With its odd atmosphere, at once inviting and moody, Penarth Road is the kind of place I’ve been seeking out since I first stepped foot in a snooker hall some 25 years ago. Yet if it feels strange in its oldness, Penarth Road is unusual in other ways too. Over the last few decades, hundreds of clubs have closed right across the country. Cardiff alone has seen the shuttering of several over recent decades, each departure snuffing out a universe of cheap pints and the baize.

It speaks, if nothing else, to the deep questions floating around snooker’s future. How can the game flourish, in this country anyway, if there are fewer places to practice and play? Why would youngsters even want to master this maddening old game, seemingly stuck in the past and played by middle-aged men? And yet, in the Far East, potting balls is increasingly seen as young and cool. It all suggests a sport at the precipice of change, as this quintessential parlour game forsakes its English roots — and globalizes alongside everything else.

On the face of it, snooker is in good shape. Over recent years, the professional tour has seen an increase in tournaments and prize money. Ticket sales are strong: the World Championships and Masters are often sell-outs, with punters eagerly handing upwards of £50 to enjoy the privilege of watching a ludicrously difficult game made to look easy.

Snooker’s global audience has also skyrocketed. That is partly down to growing interest in Europe, following the victory of Belgium’s Luca Brecel in the 2022 World Championships. China, too, is increasingly attracted to the game, with the People’s Republic hosting as many as 60 million active players. The World Professional Billiards and Snooker Association (WPBSA), the game’s governing body, reckons the World Snooker Championship, set to start in Sheffield tomorrow, could attract a global televised audience of 500 million people.

This hardly suggests a sport on its knees, as snooker truly was some years back, when the end of tobacco sponsorship saw the number of ranking tournaments dwindle to just six. Some consider the intervention of Barry Hearn, with the promoter taking control of the tour in 2010, as the moment snooker was coaxed back from the abyss. “Snooker is no longer a UK-based sport,” says Jason Ferguson, the WPBSA chairman. “It’s a truly global sport.”

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By Ross Davies

It’s perhaps unfair to gauge snooker’s success through this country alone. But for all the talk of the game’s global standing, the only other places outside the UK to host professional tournaments this season have been China, Hong Kong, Germany and Saudi Arabia. In other words, then, the sport seems popular merely in pockets, rather than being a genuinely international phenomenon.

At one point during our chat, Ferguson, himself an ex-professional, tellingly refers to snooker as a UK “export”. “There’s something still quintessentially English about the game,” he says, “be that the dress code or its history.”

It’s a reasonable point. From the bow ties and waistcoats to the emphasis on sportsmanship — players are obliged to admit to fouls even if the referee doesn’t notice — snooker still brands itself on its British roots. But what if those roots are withering? According to one estimate, Britain hosted around 650 clubs in 2019. That pales compared to the thousands that sprung up in the Eighties, when it wasn’t unusual to find three or four in any mid-sized town. Much like pubs, many went out of business after the smoking ban arrived in 2007, while others were gobbled up by developers eager for slabs of prime real estate.

Ferguson says the rate of closures has since stabilized, while implying that the market may have been oversaturated anyway. Perhaps. But beyond the raw numbers, another way of understanding British snooker’s health is by going to places like Penarth Road — and here, the prognosis feels grim.

The punters when I visit are mostly men, with few appearing under 40. One, sporting a large gray beard and wearing an old Cardiff City top, swears as an attempt at a long red misses the pocket by a proverbial country mile. He looks admonishingly at his cue and grouses to his playing partner. “I might as well be playing with a bloody boomerang,” he laments, his South Welsh drawl hanging thick about my ears.

It didn’t used to be like this. Back in the Eighties, snooker was part of the national conversation. Its cast of colorful personalities — from hellraisers like White to housewives’ favorite Cliff “The Grinder” Thorburn — were chat-show regulars. On Fleet Street, each national paper had its own in-house snooker correspondent. A miniature snooker table was the Christmas present to have for any self-respecting child. As Chas ‘n’ Dave sang it in 1986, we were all “snooker loopy”.

While it’s true that snooker’s boom period was helped by there being only four television channels, meaning most households had little choice but to watch, it arguably tapped into the era’s political zeitgeist. As Dominic Sandbrook notes in his history of Eighties Britain, this individual sport, played by working class men dressed as gentlemen, chimed with the aspirationalist promise of Thatcherism.

How, then, to explain snooker’s apparent decline since those heady days? One answer, surely, is that there are now far more distractions. Its slow and gentle rhythm puts it instantly at odds with the mores of modern society. While fans savor the ebbs and flows of the World Championship final, the idea of a sporting contest taking two days feels increasingly ridiculous.

Then there are the multiple demands of being an aspiring professional in today’s game. The long hours of practice. The costs of traveling up and down the motorway to qualifying events. The cheap hotels. The solitude. Ben Harrison, a talented former English amateur champion, abandoned the sport in 2016 because of the strain. “It just all became too much in the end,” he tells me. Harrison now leads a much happier life as a married man and estate agent in his hometown of Trowbridge. “I have no regrets.”

But snooker’s authorities are not giving up bringing young people into the game. This includes projecting a healthier image of clubs, moving away from their erstwhile reputation as smoke-filled dens of iniquity, frequented by truants, gamblers and chancers.

Yet if it’s true that many of these new venues offer better facilities, others feel more like sports bars than snooker clubs, rigged out with bright lights and big screens, where American pool tables outnumber their larger, green-baized counterparts. They don’t immediately lend themselves to the atmosphere required to play a game so demanding in concentration that Australian wit Clive James once described it as “chess with balls”.

Not that everywhere seems to take snooker so casually. For if Penarth Road Snooker Club symbolizes the game’s past, and those shiny bar-and-grill joints seem only tangentially interested in the sport, then Victoria’s Snooker Academy in Sheffield might offer a glimpse into its future.

Located in a converted modern office space, on a quiet street next to the city center — not far from the Crucible, hallowed home of the World Championships — you could easily miss the place but for an A4-sized notice Blu-Tacked to the door: “KNOCK HERE FOR SNOOKER”.

The club is silent, save for the drone of an air-conditioning unit and the purr of a fridge stocked with tubs of Asian ice cream. The wall above the door is emblazoned with a flurry of motivational buzzwords: “Creativity”; “Ambition”; “Belief”. The players, for their part, wear earbuds as they go about various practice drills in metronomic fashion on the professional-grade Star tables, as pristine as country lawns. It’s all a long way from Penarth Road: some of the tables at my old club don’t seem to have been reclothed since before Welsh devolution.

While technically open to the public, anyway, the Academy is very much a place of work. Andrew Bromley, who runs the club with his Chinese wife Victoria Shi, doesn’t seem overly bothered when I mention it’s listed as “permanently closed” on Google. “We don’t really want people coming in off the street with cans of lager and disturbing our players,” he whispers as he shows me around. “This is a professional environment.”

Fair enough: several members of the Academy’s stable have made it to ranking event finals over the past few seasons. That includes the 22-year-old Si Juahui, and the 21-year-old Wu Yize, even as Zhao Xintong captured 2022’s UK Championship at the tender age of 25.

As the names imply, Victoria has become a haven for Chinese players especially, talented young professionals who’ve come to chase their dreams. They’re far from alone — for if snooker has become popular viewing in Beijing and Chengdu, Shanghai alone may have some 1,500 clubs.

China’s fascination with snooker can be traced back to the Eighties, when Barry Hearn organized exhibition tours in Hong Kong, then still a British territory, with the hope of growing the game in Asia. But it wasn’t until an 18-year-old Ding Junhui captured the China Open in 2005 that snooker truly took off on the mainland. Ding’s success turned him into a national hero overnight, and thrust the sport into the public consciousness. Ever the shrewd businessman, Hearn’s first act upon his 2010 return to the sport was to increase the number of tournaments in China.

While there is no evidence of strategic investment in snooker on the part of China’s government, local officials have set up snooker academies. The game is also on the sporting curriculum in schools. There are even so-called snooker colleges, such as International Billiards Academy in Yushan, in which students are taught the art of the baize alongside vocational subjects.

Little wonder, then, that former world champion Stephen Hendry recently predicted that up to eight of the game’s Top 16 players, considered snooker’s elite, may hail from China in the next decade. That’s even as the People’s Republic new stars are feted as heroes in their homelands, with Bromley describing how Academy alumni “can’t walk down the street” without being recognized.

It’s again hard not to make the international comparison. Apart from Ronnie O’Sullivan — arguably the most gifted player ever to pick up a cue, and charismatic enough to have been profiled in the New Yorker — it’s tough to think of any British snooker player the public could spot in a lineup.

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But O’Sullivan, who turns 50 this year, can’t go on forever. Neither can his longtime peers Mark Williams and John Higgins — collectively known as the “Class of ’92” after the year they turned professional. At 35, world number one Judd Trump is still the closest this country has to a cue-toting wunderkind, while the reigning world champion Kyren Wilson is 33.

“Snooker could definitely do with a Luke Littler moment,” says Nick Metcalfe, host of the Talking Snooker podcast, alluding to the impact the teenager has had on darts since winning the world title earlier this year. “While we appreciate the magic of the older guys, seeing them in the big finals time after time is not necessarily a great sign.”

Neither, perhaps, is snooker’s tendency to revere its past. That nostalgia is sure to be on display with the imminent 40th anniversary of the 1985 “black ball final” — when 18.5 million TV viewers stayed up past midnight to watch a bespectacled Dennis Taylor beat Steve Davis to become champion of the world.

Taylor and Davis have recreated the famous match countless times over the years in exhibitions, featuring novelty wigs, oversized glasses and exaggerated finger wags. For Ferguson, “it’s a key milestone in the sport that we’ve got to milk.” But others believe the reminiscing has been done to death.

“I think this constant harking back to the Eighties is a real problem,” says Lewis Pirnie, a snooker analyst and frequent visitor to events in China. “The game has moved on and we should be championing the younger players. We have multiple event winners from China and there are still commentators who can’t pronounce their names correctly.”

Pirnie is obviously right. Every sport needs to regenerate if it wants to thrive. You might even say the state of snooker in Britain serves as a microcosm for the country at large: stuck in an endless Thatcherite hangover and in urgent need of renewal. All the while, a conveyor belt of talented young players continues to whir away in China, as the country enters an exciting new chapter.

Yet amid these bewildering geopolitical shifts, and a world where we want things faster and louder, snooker’s immutability remains part of the charm. You can tune into a tournament safe in the knowledge that the same old faces will be there — the same stalwarts as when TV had four channels and Neil Kinnock vied to be prime minister.

Visiting the Penarth Road Snooker Club is to be enveloped by the same kind of nostalgia. Who needs the world outside, with its natural light and unspeakable problems, when within the perpetual gloam there awaits the promise of cut-price lager and a black ball finish?

As I go to pay up, I’m drawn once more to that old photo of the Whirlwind, shrine-like behind the bar. “He was a real character, wasn’t he?” says one punter returning a tray of balls in an enormous splayed hand to the counter. “But then there were lots of them around back in those days.” As I step back out into the starry Welsh night, I can still hear the gentle click of balls as another synth classic strikes up.

Here, then, we have the one of the least welcome developments of the 2020s: the return, after decades of absence, of the terrible spectre of nuclear war. And for those old enough to remember what it was like the first time round — or for their children who’ve watched the clips on YouTube — surely the most disturbing example of what atomic catastrophe might actually look like was first broadcast 40 years ago today. Shown by BBC Two on 23 September 1984, Threads is more horrifying and urgent than ever.

The scenario imagined in Threads is troublingly familiar. After an American-backed coup in a strategically important nation — in this case Iran — the Soviets invade. The US then moves to deploy troops. In unemployment-hit Sheffield, meanwhile, ordinary life goes on. A young couple prepares to become parents. The husband’s middle-aged father has been laid off; his redundancy money will go toward the renovation of the family’s home. Elsewhere, the local council is quietly making preparations in the event of war. Sheffield’s size, and the proximity of RAF Finningley, make the South Yorkshire town a prime target.

It is, by common consent, one of the darkest films ever made. There’s a disturbing sense of logical inevitability about the way the world moves step-by-step toward the precipice. The attack, when it comes, is unflinching, unsentimental and horrifyingly believable. 

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Writer Barry Hines — best-known for his novel A Kestrel for a Knave  — sketches his native milieu with deft assurance. Hines, who died in 2016, was from the mining village of Hoyland, just outside Sheffield. In his career, he often focused on Northern England’s working class, and Threads is no different. As the Iran crisis escalates, for instance, we see protesters taking to the streets in a Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament march (most of the film’s actors were in fact CND members). Days later, there’s a moment of black humour when a speaker at a much more fraught protest calls for a general strike, as if that could have any effect whatsoever. It’s tempting to read the scene as a subtle comment on the eclipse of traditional Left politics in the age of Thatcherism.

Indeed, the whole film takes on added depth when viewed within that context: I think the film’s darkness has its roots not simply in the terrifying subject matter, but also in the broader political context of the Eighties. Labour had taken a radical turn under Michael Foot, with predictably dire consequences for the British Left. In 1983, after all, the Tories won a bumper majority, even as Labour slumped to their worst defeat since 1931. Success at the ballot box in turn ensured that the Thatcherite economic revolution would continue, and that resistance would largely be futile. 

By 1984, the great dismantling of British social democracy was proceeding apace: businesses were privatised, unions were crushed, and social houses were being flogged to ex-tenants. Importantly for Hines, moreover, most of the pain was happening to northerners like him: by September 1986, 94% of the jobs that had been lost under Thatcherism were north of a line stretching from the Bristol Channel to the Wash.

For Leftists like Hines, Western defence policy doubtless explains Threads’ grim flavour too. Early in her premiership, Thatcher allowed the Americans to base nuclear-armed cruise missiles at RAF Greenham Common near Newbury, prompting protestors, almost exclusively women, to establish a “peace camp” at the base. The missiles were rightly seen as geopolitically destabilising since they could, in theory, be used to launch a surprise attack on Soviet targets like Moscow. That was echoed by instability elsewhere. The early Eighties saw a number of dangerous incidents — including the downing of a Korean Air passenger plane that had strayed into Soviet airspace, as well as provocative military exercises and false nuclear alarms — any one of which could easily have produced a crisis like that dramatised by Threads.

It hardly helped that, at the point the film came out, communication between East and West was minimal, with neither side having an accurate idea of what the other was thinking. In a June 1984 diary entry, for instance, Ronald Reagan recorded his shock at learning that Yuri Andropov, his by-then late Soviet counterpart, had genuinely suspected the president of plotting his own Operation Barbarossa: a pre-emptive nuclear strike on the USSR. 

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Economic upheaval at home and geopolitical tensions abroad, dovetailed with the ever-present threat of a mushroom-cloud disaster, all explain the movie’s distinctive style. And revisited today, Threads certainly manages to startle with its modernist aesthetic and bleak, eerie mood. It completely lacks the music that hamstrings so many modern docudramas. Hines, for his part, was even reluctant to include a narrator in his film, arguing that Paul Vaughan’s voiceover detracted from the drama. But Vaughan’s contribution works superbly. A familiar voice from BBC arts and science programmes, his terse descriptions of terrors like the impact of radiation lend authority to the film — by tying it to a familiar and cosy televisual world, Threads becomes all the more disquieting.

Yet more than its narrator, it’s surely the denouement of Threads that makes it so enduring. When, after ratcheting up the tension, we’re finally shown the actual bombing, it is genuinely frightening. There are no heroics, only suffering and death, either instantaneous or slow. Later, the nuclear exchange having run its course, a stark computer readout informs us that 3,000 megatons have been exploded globally, with 210 falling on Britain. Needless to say, the film’s second half isn’t easy to watch. Threads explores severals aspects of desperate postwar life: the hazards of radiation; the search for loved ones in the ruins; shortages of food and water; the collapse of law and order; the shooting of looters; the impossibility of treating the multitudes of sick and injured; the coming of nuclear winter. Just as powerful is the film’s final minutes, which shows the world years after the bombs have fallen. Almost everyone seems to be under eighteen, the clear implication being that no one lives very long anymore. Technology is at near-medieval levels.

This wretched narrative is hammered home by an utter lack of sentimentality. Threads has no heroes and major characters die abruptly. What viewers get instead are wordless montages, and blunt facts delivered in cyan text on a black screen. As in Brecht’s theatre, interpreting what is put before us in our usual clichéd, complacent way is made impossible.

Taken together, there’s even a sense in which the film strikes even at the religious convictions then loudly professed by many in the radical conservative movement that carried Reagan to the White House. Threads’ modernist vision of the universe is uncompromising: austere, matter-of-fact, devoid of metaphysical consolations. Even the Apocalypse, when it comes, appears to have no religious significance. The Rapture looked forward to by Evangelicals is nowhere to be seen. Life struggles on, but under massively worse conditions.

Docudramas as accomplished as Threads, so full of dark passion and righteous anger, are rare today. The gravity and urgency of the political situation in the mid-Eighties inspired a superb example of British cinematic modernism. The defenders of social democracy knew their world was disappearing, but faced an infinitely worse possibility: the destruction of the world, tout court. It’s clear this threat has in some way returned — thanks to Putin’s threats, but also events in the Middle East and Asia-Pacific — though I have my doubts whether our governing or creative classes fully grasp what that means.

Today there is a lack of vision. Perhaps the Cold War is distant enough that its lessons are being forgotten. Watch Threads and you’ll recall them soon enough. 

To understand Sheffield Hallam, you first need to forget everything you thought you knew about Sheffield. Unlike the city’s industrial east, Hallam’s neighbourhoods are invariably described as “leafy”, and its houses – stacking up the hills in sometimes alarming angles – climb up into the Peak District.

Its politics are similarly at odds with the rest of Sheffield. While Margaret Thatcher was reviled across the rest of South Yorkshire, the constituency gave her its strong backing. Then, as the country at large swung towards New Labour in 1997, Hallam’s Labour vote actually dropped. Previous Tory and Labour voters both threw themselves behind a new loyalty — the Lib Dems, who kept a tight grip on the area, with more than 50% of the vote, for several elections; first with Richard Allan, and then Nick Clegg. 

But at the end of the coalition years, Labour support soared, with (the now metro mayor of South Yorkshire) Oliver Coppard contesting the seat in 2015. He didn’t quite manage it, but two years later Nick Clegg was ejected anyway. In the most recent election, Labour’s majority was wafer-thin: just 712 votes, or 1.2% of the vote. It’s now the only Labour/Lib Dem marginal in the country.

Here’s another statistic that tells you just how unusual Sheffield Hallam is: Labour’s current candidate and until recently local MP Olivia Blake won in 2019 with just 34.6% of the vote. That was the lowest vote share for a winner anywhere in Britain, as the Conservatives still took a big chunk of the votes. In fact, looking at the numbers, Hallam should still be a Tory seat.

Sheffield-based geographer Alasdair Rae has produced a fascinating chart from the 2019 election (see below), showing how constituencies voted by their level of deprivation. At the top left is the UK’s most deprived constituency, Liverpool Walton. And at the bottom right is the UK’s least deprived constituency, Wokingham. There’s a clear blue/red pattern, as more deprived constituencies generally voted Labour (though Johnson’s Tories made some big inroads), while less deprived constituencies generally voted Conservative, or occasionally Lib Dem.

Hallam (circled), however, bucks the national trend. It’s the ninth least deprived constituency in the country — its children are well-educated, its people are relatively healthy, its crime rates are low. And despite all that, it elected a Labour MP.

Blake’s theory is that Hallam is not immune to the problems faced by the country, rather the constituency embodies them. “It’s definitely been trending Left,” she tells me, which she thinks is related to an influx of groups like young families: “The demographics have shifted quite considerably in our favour.” She also argues that Hallam’s apparent affluence can be misleading. “On paper, you might look at Hallam and think ‘it’s the wealthiest seat in South Yorkshire, they’ll be isolated from the cost-of-living crisis,’ but that’s certainly not what I’ve been picking up.”

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Data on constituencies can be a bit patchy, but it’s not clear that age is a big factor in this Left shift. It’s true that the number of people in their 20s has gone up. But among people in their 30s, it’s pretty flat, while there are now far more 70-somethings. Perhaps there’s some truth, though, in the notion that the younger middle classes now tend to be more Left-leaning than in previous generations, and maybe the broader Left-wing bent of the city has seeped into this wealthier outpost. Brexit is also likely to be a factor — Hallam voted strongly for Remain.

But national trends can only tell us so much, particularly when a race is as neck-and-neck as it is in Hallam. So much for the parties then, what of the personalities of the two people in with a chance? 

I’ve spent time with both, and there’s quite a clear difference in style between Blake and Shaffaq Mohammed, the Lib Dem contender. Where Blake is bubbly, Mohammed is more sedate. Mohammed lives in industrial Tinsley, has a family background in steel, and speaks with an accent that blends his Kashmiri heritage and a Sheffield inflection. Blake’s middle-class background, meanwhile, hews closer to most Hallam constituents; her Yorkshire accent is nearer to what some describe as “Northern RP” — clean consonants, flat vowels. Mohammed is only ever seen wearing a suit and tie, Blake is a bit more dressed down. The snap election has been awkwardly timed for them both: Mohammed is in the midst of renovations on his house, while one of Blake’s dogs needs to have an eye operation.

When I join them, the gathering of Labour activists for Blake’s round of canvassing includes a few local councillors and a student who has been out every day since his exams finished  Despite being elevated to the House of Lords a few years ago, Baroness Blake of Leeds clearly still relishes street politics. 

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There’s an odd mix of houses along the canvassing route near Endcliffe Park — palatial Victorian villas, more modest bungalows, and low-rise blocks of flats. The voters are similarly eclectic. One describes himself as “apolitical” and refuses to buzz Blake into his block of flats so she can post her leaflets. Another is delighted when he clocks who Blake is: “The animal lover!” he cries. “Yes!” agrees Blake. He goes on to talk to her in quite some detail about recent happenings among the local badger populations — before confirming he will indeed vote Labour. 

At another home, a crisp voice over the intercom is apologetic, but firm. “Ok, I’m going to stop you right there,” she instructs Blake. She would vote for Labour, were it not for one issue: their policy of levying VAT on private school fees. “Under no circumstances whatsoever will I ever vote Labour unless that policy changes,” she tells Blake, explaining that she works for a private school that may have to close. “I would not send any child of mine to the state schools in the area,” she avers. As we walk away, Blake says that she believes claims of school closures are a bit “overblown”, and that this isn’t the aim of the policy.

Blake herself is on the Left of the Labour Party, having served in Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet and being less in tune with the current Starmer leadership. I ask her how concerned she’s been about the way figures on the Left, such as Diane Abbott, have been treated. “Everyone was a bit concerned about Diane, but I’m pleased we got to the right decision about that,” she says.

The following week, Shaffaq Mohammed suggests a meeting outside at Endcliffe Park café, meaning right next to the funfair. It feels very on brand for the Lib Dems, whose national campaign has been themed around Ed Davey doing various silly stunts. Mohammed discloses that he was invited along to Thorpe Park with Davey, but “me and rides don’t get on”.

Mohammed — or “Shaff” as his team call him — is also the leader of the Lib Dem group on the council. On the doorstep, he explains that voters’ biggest issues are the NHS and the environment, in that order. He draws particular attention to dentistry, explaining that he, like many, has been waiting for an appointment at the Charles Clifford Dental Hospital to have a tooth fixed.

On the environment, he talks at length about sewage dumping, describing the number of spills in Hallam as unacceptable. He’s tried to create a wedge with Labour on this — one of Mohammed’s recent leaflets claimed that “our Labour MP voted with the government to let [Yorkshire Water] off the hook”. The vote he’s referring to is an amendment to bring Ofwat, the water regulator, under the Growth Duty — which requires regulators to have regard for promoting economic growth. Mohammed claims this could allow water companies to escape fines for polluting rivers. Blake doesn’t comment on the specifics of that piece of legislation, but her spokesperson told me: “This is a feeble attempt by the Lib Dems to claim credit for the hard work through which campaigners and the Labour frontbench raised the issue to the top of the political agenda.”

Despite losing his seat more than five years ago, Nick Clegg still looms large over Hallam. As revealed by the Financial Times, Clegg has donated to the local Liberal Democrats — though how much exactly is unclear. Mohammed tells me that they’re occasionally in touch. He admits that the student fees issue — which did so much to put some voters off Clegg — still comes up on the doorstep. Whether that’s fair or not is one thing (Mohammed points out none of the parties are now proposing to cut tuition fees), but it might still linger with some of those late 20-somethings who have moved to Hallam.

So who will win come 4 July? On one reading, Labour should have it sewn up. In 2019, “Peak Corbyn” was well and truly over, while Sheffield Hallam’s Labour MP in the previous parliament, Jared O’Mara, was booted out of the party for making misogynistic and homophobic comments, and was later convicted of fraud. If the Lib Dems couldn’t take the seat even then, surely an ascendant Labour Party will do so comfortably? Most bookies are currently backing Labour to hold it — offering only 1/5 on this outcome, vs 3/1 on the Lib Dems. 

But things aren’t quite so straightforward. Not least because 2024 may well see a collapse in Conservative support as their campaign continues to falter. The party only chose its Hallam candidate a few weeks ago — Isaac Howarth, currently a student at Sheffield University — and there’s no sign of Tory leaflets in the constituency. It’s fair to say they’re not looking to put up a big fight here.

If the Tory vote crumbles, things become unpredictable. Should those supporters break for the Lib Dems, as in 1997, then they could yet snatch Hallam back. And Mohammed points out that if you tot up the votes from this year’s local elections across all of Sheffield Hallam’s five wards, the Lib Dems come out comfortably on top — with 13,133 votes to Labour’s 9,814. 

But the momentum Labour has at the national level will be hard to overcome. Blake describes herself as “pretty confident” about winning. “[In 2019] we had to go back three or four times, just to our voters… this time we’re trying to persuade other people to vote for us.” For those of us staying up to report on the election, a long night is likely. The smart money is on a recount — but as ever in Hallam, I wouldn’t bet on it.

***

A version of this piece appeared in The Sheffield Tribune.

Often, I got the wrong end of the stick. For instance, I thought that the “Government” and the “Opposition” were the names of the main political parties. I guess that means I must have understood the concept of a political party, but that’s not so surprising: at school, where our playground was basically a field, we literally built rival camps in it.

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By the time I went to secondary school, the details of Westminster’s rival camps became clearer to me — as did which side I “belonged” to.

Everything counts in large amounts, but few things were big in the world I grew up in. It was a small town life of little platoons. Its people stood on their own two feet, without rising to any great height.

We liked it that way and Margaret Thatcher gave the impression that she liked us. Whether or not we liked her — and feelings were mixed — she communicated a value system that made sense. Even the leftiest of our teachers espoused the virtues of hard work and personal responsibility, thus inadvertently echoing the Thatcherite message.

*

And then I went to university, in Sheffield: the naïve Kentish lad transplanted to a big northern city. It didn’t take me long to realise that Thatcherism wasn’t working for everyone. Back home, “de-industrialisation” was a word in a textbook (or at least would have been had our textbooks been remotely up-to-date). Now I saw it with my own eyes.

Not that Sheffield has ever conformed to the stereotypes. Standard depictions of the city, in films like The Full Monty, only tell part of the story. Yes, there was (and is) real deprivation, but also neighbourhoods that put the leafiest of southern suburbs to shame.

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Of course, nothing in life is ever simple — including my “political awakening”. I’m not about to recount a tale of dramatic transformation. I didn’t abandon my shire conservatism and become a doctrinaire socialist.

Rather, it gradually dawned on me that the mantra of “market good, state bad” was just as absurd as its opposite. When I arrived in Sheffield, the buses had just been deregulated and privatised. For the sake of creating competition (on the most profitable routes, of course), the overall system was mucked up (with consequences across the North that last to this day). Local people were furious, not just because of the degraded services, but also because they’d been disrespected — the changes having been imposed by an ideologically-blinkered government.

From my first week as a student, I was put off Left-wing politics by the newspaper-selling Trotskyites on campus. How could these fanatics be so committed to their inhumanly abstract, utterly impractical theories? Couldn’t they see how their ideas would blow up on contact with the real world? Then again, was the Conservative government (busily rolling-out the Poll Tax at the time) so very different? 

The doubts grew in my mind; and yet I was still captive to the binary politics of the era. Yes, Thatcher was fallible. But who’d liberated the Falklands, seen-off the union barons and stood up to Communism?

People who think that politics is polarised now should have been around in the 1980s. There was no room for nuance, just one titanic struggle: East-versus-West, Left-versus-Right, Red-versus-Blue. But with the start of a new decade, everything changed. The Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet bloc collapsed. It was the end of an era at home, too. Margaret Thatcher was pushed out and the old simplicities went with her.

By that time, I was living neither in halls nor in a student house, but in lodgings. That had the benefit of taking me out of the university bubble, and the Sheffield people I got to know were nothing like the middle class lefties on campus. Both groups detested Maggie, of course, but that’s all they had in common. I couldn’t know it at the time, but the Remain-versus-Leave cleavage that would surface decades later was there all along.

Student politics taught me that the Right was an incoherent category too. What did I have in common with the campus libertarians for whom the individual was everything and the community nothing?

So, by the time I graduated, the Left-versus-Right model of politics was broken — at least in my own mind. The trouble is that I had nothing to replace it with. I was a science student; I didn’t have any labels for the political ideas I was looking for. In fact, terms like Blue Labour, Red Tory and post-liberalism hadn’t even entered the conversation.

So it was a long time before I could even name the politics I believed in. And yet, like a lot of indefinable qualities, you know it when you see it.

*

A revelation of the visual kind, one spring day when I was revising for my A-Levels, is probably the closest experience to a political awakening I ever had.

Adults try to prepare teenagers for all sorts of “changes”, but they don’t tell you about the awakening of one’s aesthetic sensibilities. I know that sounds pretentious, but it’s when you suddenly notice beauty in the world — and not just the human variety. Suddenly, you see nature not just as a big green thing to mess around in, but as full of wonder.

I don’t suppose it’s the same for everyone, but for me, looking out the window one day and being struck by that wonder was a profound experience. It made me view our built environment in a different way, too. Having been bored by architecture as a child, as a young adult it became a source of joy… and also dismay.

Why, I wondered, had we made such a mess of our towns and cities? Why such needless, pointless ugliness? Why would a rich country build dysfunctional places for people to live in? Who was responsible for this disaster?

Further reading

The hideous spread of 'spreadsheet architecture'

By Peter Franklin

The answer was staring me in the face. Some of the monstrous carbuncles had been built by the state and others by the market. Both were responsible. Both had imposed their will without listening to local people. And whether it was done in the name of progress or profit, the outcome was the same.

Some would say these are just matters of taste. I say they’re deeply political — because the same dehumanising arrogance is at work in all spheres: economical, social, environmental and cultural.

That’s why I’ve long lost patience with the partisans of both the market and the state. There is so much that matters more than either — and that is vulnerable to both.