The
Unofficial Website
The Wharncliffe Street Area
including Drummond Street & Walker Place
Wharncliffe Street run from the Central Library up the hill to the traffic lights at the junction of Doncaster Gate, Doncaster Road and Clifton Lane. It is often called Wharncliffe Hill and it certainly is a steep hill. At the bottom of the hill the road become Drummond Street which meets the pedestrian areas of Walker Place and Effingham Square and then passes into the Bus Station. Drummond Street used to run right over Crinoline Bridge to join Greasbrough Road but the road was cut in half when Centenary Way was built. It is not really a definable area, but several of the council's offices, the library, the markets, and part of the buildings of Rotherham College are hereabouts so it has to have some importance.
I have been wracking my brains, such as they are, trying to remember what was on the east side of Drummond Street and Wharncliffe Street before the bulldozers moved in in the 1960s. I have to confess that I have absolutely no recollection of this area whatsoever. I am certain though that it has changed entirely. Massive areas were cleared for the Central Library and Arts Centre, and the various council offices - Civic Buildings, Norfolk House and Crinoline House, and for the new road systems and the bus station. In my own modest opinion some of the most awful monstrosities of modern architecture.
The new plans for the rebuilding of Rotherham, if they ever get off the ground, would yet again involve bulldozing most of the buildings in this area.
Drummond Street is a busy bit of dual carriageway which has madly irritating pedestrian crossings and sets of traffic lights. I can speak from experience that these are largely uncoordinated and moving up or down the road is usually an annoying Brake, Crawl, Brake. To compound the experience many of the pedestrians have absolutely no intention of taking any notice as to whether the lights are on pedestrian phase or not. If fact I have seen some with a positive death wish. It surprises me that there have not been more accidents here. I have only seen one and that was a car that had driven into the side of a bus at the entrance to the Bus Station. I still haven't figured out quite how he did it.
This is the Civic Building, one of Rotherham's civic buildings from the 1960s. Also known as Walker House.
The Hastings Clock was originally sited in Effingham Square but is now situated in front of one of the late Twentieth Century's ghastly concrete canyons that pass for architecture around here. This is now on the corner of Drummond Street and Walker Place rather than in the present day square. I don't know if it kept the right time in 1912 but it sure doesn't now. Although there are have been many attempts to regulate it they have never been successful for long. The clock never tells the right time. It was actually called the Coronation Fountain in 1912 as there appears to have been water features around the base. These have now gone.
The pedestrianised area called Walker Place is to the right of this picture. The entrance to the Library and Arts Centre is here. When I think of the lovely old library building on Howard Street and then I look at this I could weep. Well the old library with its beautiful domed glass ceiling has long disappeared under the bulldozers and we have this.
A bit further down is yet another of those glorious monuments to Council architecture - Norfolk House in Walker Place.
Then there's Crinoline House, opposite the Bus Station.
