Talk:Districts of Sheffield

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This may be a silly question but does "district" have any special definition in this context? Do the districts have defined boundaries and do they line up with the ward boundries? Andreww 9 July 2005 01:45 (UTC)

Not a silly question, but more complicated than you might think. I think that we are using a very loose definition of the word district. This article was broken out from the Sheffield article back in April. Before that the list of districts on the Sheffield page referred to them as localities and settlements rather than districts. Prior to that time I had decided that something needed to be done about the fact that the articles relating to the districts were for the most part nonexistent (the list mostly contained red-links) and, where articles did exist they were mostly very short stubs. After a discussion with the user who had originally added to list to the Sheffield article I decided that it was easier to write articles about the political wards as these were easier to define than the districts. So, when this article was created I hijacked it (apologies to the creator) and structured it as a hub for the ward articles that I had written. The creator of this article used the term district and I chose not to argue. My take on the districts is as I have tried to explain in the indroductory paragraph for the article—that is for the most part that they don't really exist as such. They have no well defined boundaries, no political standing, and are really just an artifact of the history of the city and the way the city grew—engulfing small villages and hamlets and filling in the gaps with housing estates. I think that some of the districts that were originally villages (e.g. Dore and Norton) are pretty well defined (you could pribably even draw boundaries for them). Many of the others though have an obvious centre, but then just merge into the surrounding districts without there being obvious boundaries. A few districts, like Abbeydale (for which I might one day attempt to write an article), are almost impossible to define. In the case of Abbeydale I think that if you asked 10 different locals where it is you would get 10 different answers. JeremyA 9 July 2005 04:24 (UTC)

Thanks for that. I think your comment about the districts being an artifact of the history of the city hits the nail on the head. The only problem, as I see it, is that some links are redirected to wards and that is sometimes suprising if you follow the link. For example in History of Sheffield article notes that Gleadless may be a Saxon settelment but this is redirected to Arbourthorne and this opens with:

Arbourthorne ward is one of the 28 electoral wards in City of Sheffield, England. It is located in the southeastern part of the city. It covers an area of 4.5 square kilometres and includes the districts of Norfolk Park, Arbourthorne and Gleadless.

which can be a bit of a suprise. What I sugest is that the districts should always be noted in the first paragraph for the ward article and where possible we should have a sub section on each "district" - I thnk you have done this already - and that the district names should be emboldend in the first paragraph. This should let the reader know at once that they are in the correct place. I'll do this for the Arbouthorne article - let me know what you think. Andreww 10:52, 30 July 2005 (UTC)

• • • I agree with you that a redirect from Gleadless to Arbourthorne is a suprise for readers. However, I hope that you agree that this is better than a redlink (which is what Gleadless was before I made the redirect). My original hope was that the ward pages would grow and that I would be able to break out district articles into full articles (see, for example Ecclesall, and the sub-article Millhouses). Unfortunately this project is running out of steam a little for me because I am running out of source material and as I now live in the US it is a little difficult to get more sources. I have re-adjusted the introduction of the Arbourthorne article to give the district names as early as possible, and I have linked the word district to this article—see what you think. JeremyA (talk) 01:29, 31 July 2005 (UTC)

[edit] District links

I have started adding the links to the various districts of Sheffield which have their own article. As I go through these districts and populate them I'll then add the link here. It would be nice if ultimately all districts with substantial information about them had their own article outside of the political Wards articles. Captain scarlet 10:48, 21 February 2006 (UTC)

Thanks; that was what I had hoped for when I created the ward articles. Things have progressed slower than I thought they would, but I agree that the ultimate goal would be to have articles for most districts (some named districts are actually quite small and so it may be difficult to write substantial articles about them). JeremyA 15:06, 21 February 2006 (UTC)