Joseph Food explores the Megatron
Like many others, my early experiences of the fabled network of subterranean waterways known as the Megatron came via snippets of online trivia, local rumour and the odd urbex blog. This interest was piqued further when Salt Productions released a beautifully crafted video in 2015, ‘Beneath our Streets’, showing wakeboarders zipping around the Victorian-era culverts, grinding over makeshift ramps and drifting through stunning brick-tiled arches.
Many knew of the legend, but few had ventured down there, which naturally put it right up there on my Sheffield bucket list.
Imagine the delight, then, when an email from Sheffield Adventure Film Festival (ShAFF) dropped into my inbox, announcing they were joining forces with The Outdoor City to arrange a unique urban caving trip into the heart of the vast 18th century storm drain. After being led into depths of the system by caving instructors, we would view some exclusive short films ahead of the festival and even enjoy some live music in undoubtedly the strangest gig of the year thus far.
‘Yes. God yes.’ I think was my typed response verbatim.
A few days later and decked out in caving suits, wellies and hard hats our entourage entered via the recently developed Porter Brook pocket park, walking crouched for a good ten minutes before reaching another entrance by the train station. Here the underground tunnels began to fork off and separate as we reached a large chamber where a couple of the rivers (I can’t remember which – sorry) converged. To say it had been a relatively dry couple of days, it was surprising to see how quickly the water moved and how deep it could go – as I found when a lapse of concentration led me almost up to my chest in the drink after stepping into a flooded trench. The importance of bringing walking sticks along for balance and to feel for any sudden drops became clear as I shuffled my sodden frame along the dark tunnels.
“Did it smell?” I’ve been asked. No, not really. It was actually quite peaceful down there – which probably says more about the state of my psyche than the comfort of dark, underground riverways – but there was something undeniably soothing about standing a few metres beneath a bustling city centre and hearing only running water. The large archaic brick constructions we walked through clashed with the odd piece of modern detritus brought in by the floodwaters: plastic shopping bags, bottles, wrappers, deflated footballs – signs of human activity above that looked hugely out of place in such uninhabitable surrounds.
We later congregated in the middle of one particularly large culvert while singer-songwriter Rhiannan Scutt, once part of popular South Yorkshire group Rita Payne, tested out the echoing acoustics by treating us to a couple of songs. Afterwards we turned our attentions to a pop-up screen and watched a selection of adrenaline-pumping short films before Simon Ogden, chair of Sheffield Waterways Group, spoke to us about the city’s history with its rivers – from the filth-ridden streams of yesteryear to the restored wildlife-supporting habitats of today. There’s even a proposal, ‘Putting the Sheaf Back in Sheffield’, being put forward to reopen a section of the River Sheaf near the train station to create an inner-city park called Sheaf Field as part of the Castlegate redevelopment programme.
Upon reaching the cavernous, Cathedral-style Megatron – named due to its science fiction-esque appearance – we hit “peak Sheffield” and heard lyrics read out from the PULP song ‘Wickerman’, inspired by the time Jarvis Cocker spent an afternoon cruising the River Don on a dinghy. True story.
“Just behind the station, before you reach the traffic island, a river runs through a concrete channel.
I took you there once; I think it was after the Leadmill.”
It was a fitting end to a day spent exploring Sheffield’s heritage while also probing much of its future potential. With the effort to clean the city’s river ways achieving positive results – wild salmon have recently been spotted in the Don for the first time in 200 years – and its once industrial, concrete-laden city centre undergoing significant cultural regeneration, the re-opening up of our forgotten rivers could have a key role to play in providing new open spaces for us all to enjoy. Watch this space.
