Sheffield - Europan 9 site

Opportunities and challenges

The Skye Edge scheme in South Sheffield is a pivotal project within a wider programme of regeneration and is led by Sheffield City Council and its key stakeholders. Despite its excellent location, the area does not have a strong private housing market. The challenge here is to create new housing to aspire to and to improve the quality of life for existing communities.

Skye Edge has panoramic views over the city and the Peak District National Park beyond. It is highly visible and offers a unique opportunity to create a new horizon on the city. The design should create the conditions for a well-integrated, high-quality sustainable neighbourhood, where people will want to live and which will offer housing with strong links to the city centre and surrounding neighbourhoods.

Key to the success of the project is radical improvement of the landscape setting for the new and existing housing. Sheffield is famous as a green city, for its parks and leafy suburbs. The design for Skye Edge should offer a contemporary interpretation of the 'garden city', which was said to offer all the advantages of city life with the pleasures of the country.

City context

Sheffield’s city centre is in a valley surrounded by seven hills. The site – Skye Edge - is on the ridge of a hill to the east. It is a long site flanked by a steeply sloping wooded escarpment and a large interwar housing estate: The Wybourn Estate. It has panoramic views over the city.

The Wybourn Estate was built in the 1930s as a garden suburb providing 1,200 homes away from industry in the Parkway below. The Estate is owned by the council but is soon to be transferred to a housing association. There is a need to provide better amenity for the estate and to offer a more diverse range of affordable housing.

The Skye Edge site was developed in the 1970s as a long monolithic block of maisonettes and flats, which were demolished in 2005, as they were unpopular and no longer fully occupied.