Park Hill estate, Sheffield's notorious landmark, gets £100m revamp | UK news | The Guardian

Park Hill estate, Sheffield's notorious landmark, gets £100m revamp | UK news | The Guardian

For many people in Sheffield over recent decades, Park Hill was the last place you would want to end up living as a social tenant. It thus sounds little short of a miracle that around 1,000 people have expressed an interest in buying a flat in the vast postwar housing estate, a fortnight before the homes even go on sale.

It is, in fact, the first indication that a hugely ambitious £100m gamble on the rehabilitation of that most disparaged of architectural styles, postwar brutalism, might pay off. For more than 50 years Park Hill has been one of Sheffield's most famous – or, depending on your view, notorious – landmarks, looming vast and grey on a hill overlooking the city centre. It was designed in the late 1950s by Ivor Smith and Jack Lynn, a pair of idealistic young modernists, and replaced a badly bombed slum area.