I have been building Sheffield Events for about ten years. It started as a list of things happening in the city, and it has turned into something closer to a map of how to be part of it.
Why it exists
My own circumstances have often made getting out of the house harder than it looks, and good planning is what makes the difference. That is why I built this site: to help everyone get out and about and enjoy everything wonderful Sheffield has to offer again. When going out takes planning, a big pile of listings is no help at all.
What helps is knowing, before you commit. What is on, where it is, what it costs, how you get there, whether it will be raining when it starts, whether anyone like you will be in the room. That is really what this site does: it pulls scattered facts together and lines them up next to each other, because correlating the data is what turns a vague idea into something you can actually decide about. Peace of mind is mostly just having the specifics in one place.
What it is for
Sheffield is a city of villages and it is better than it knows. There is more on in a week here than most people see in a year, and a lot of it is free. The problem was never that Sheffield is short of things to do. It is that the information is scattered across a hundred places, and if your energy is limited you spend all of it on the looking.
So the site gathers it and adds the parts people actually need in order to turn up:
- Every event with the practical detail: the time, the venue, the price, how to get there, which buses are heading that way now, and what the weather will be doing when it starts.
- A map of the city with live buses and trams, rain radar, rivers and air quality, and the things nobody lists anywhere sensible: public toilets, drinking water, defibrillators, cycle parking and chargers.
- A page for every one of 147 neighbourhoods, with what is around you there and a scorecard for how quiet, green, connected, affordable and well served it is, workings shown.
- Help near you for the weeks when what you need is a foodbank, a warm space, a GP or somewhere to sit down.
- Sheffield History, classes and regular sessions, the directory, and a glossary of local words, because nobody should feel like an outsider for not knowing what a gennel is.
Who it is for
Everyone, and I mean that in a specific way rather than a polite one. Sheffield has brilliant scenes that barely know each other exist. Drag nights and dance classes and parkour and skating and choirs and running clubs and board game cafes, all full of people who would get on, all advertising in their own corner. I would like this to build a few bridges between them.
If you already have your people, the site should help you find the next thing. If you do not, it should give you somewhere to start that does not require knowing anyone first. And if going out is genuinely difficult for you, whether that is anxiety, pain, money or access, it is built by someone who plans every trip out too.
How it is made, and why it is free
It is a hobby project, not a business. There is no paywall, nothing costs anything to list, and I am not selling anything to anyone.
The information comes from open public data, refreshed on a schedule and credited to its source: the council, the NHS, the Environment Agency, Ordnance Survey, Historic England, OpenStreetMap, Wikidata and dozens more. You can see every source with its licence and take the data back out again through the open data API to build something of your own. That part matters to me. Facts about a city should not be locked up inside one person’s website, including mine.
Say hello
If you run something in Sheffield, put it on here. It is free and it takes a couple of minutes. If something on the site is wrong, tell me and I will fix it. If you are working on something similar, I would like to hear about it.
Thanks for reading. I hope you find something good to go to.
Shane