My parents and most of my family are from Leeds, but I grew up in Northampton. Up until the age of about six, I did have a Yorkshire accent, but it went when I started school, so now everyone around me thinks I’m posh!
Yorkshire has always been important to me and we’d be up visiting friends and family and watching Leeds United on TV without missing a game. I started playing the cello when I was eight, and growing up on a council estate, no one brought a cello home, but I’ve got brilliant parents who were like, ‘I don’t know what it is, I don’t know what you do with it, but we’ll work it out.’ That opened doors for me to go to university.
When it came to choosing a uni, I came up to Sheffield for an open day and as soon as I landed I thought it was the place for me. That was it. I couldn’t believe the hills. The hills blew my mind – I grew up somewhere totally flat, so the way everything rolled around with all the greenery was beautiful. People said hello in the street, which I thought was just a weird thing my mum did. But here, it’s just how people are. Friendly, welcoming. I felt really at home.
That was back in 2007, and I’ve been here ever since – longer than I’ve lived anywhere else. I knew pretty quickly that I wasn’t going anywhere, and I’d already heard the rumours that people never leave. As a musician, there was always that pull of places like London or Manchester, but something about Sheffield just made sense.
I was always a bit of a hustler, so I got stuck in straight away. I got a job at the Blue Moon Café and had the best boss in the world. Bill was a proper legend who looked after all of us students, sending us home with big pack-ups from work. Bill and his wife are brilliant people and that was an amazing part of Sheffield. This complete stranger, with no ulterior motive, was just behaving with complete kindness.
He was also a big music fan so we started doing gigs in the café – and set up a string quartet to do weddings with my pals. I started doing session work too, met Alan Smyth and recorded on his Omnicord Album, which was my first recording session in Sheffield. That led to more stuff with people like Reverend and the Makers, Ed Cosens, KOG and others in the local indie scene. I played wherever needed strings – basically strings for hire – sometimes doing little tours, all while doing a master’s in performance at Uni of Sheffield and travelling to London once a week for cello lessons – it was intense.
For eight years my main creative outlet was Before Breakfast, where I got to make music with my best mates and be part of a band trying to do things a little differently. It showed me what creativity can be, and we shared a genuine connection.
Even then, though, I didn’t feel like I was in the community properly. I lived around Crookes and S11 for a while, taught music, played gigs, but it felt a bit like a bubble of music and uni people. That changed when I started volunteering at a conversation club for refugees. That was the first time I really connected with a broader part of Sheffield – having lunch with people from all over the world, hearing their amazing stories. I did a fundraiser for them, and somehow it kept them going for over a decade. When they shut recently, they gave the last of their money to TRACKS. That meant a lot.
From there, I did more charity work – my mum has MS so I did fundraisers for the MS Society. I realised how much I loved organising and I got a lot of joy out of that.
During lockdown, I was living on the Manor, and for the first time, I felt completely at home in a neighbourhood. People would tell me not to move there because my accent doesn’t reflect my background, but I actually felt way more at home. Immediately, I felt like something lifted. I lived there for five years and I loved it – it was a special time.
My partner – now husband – moved in with me eventually. He’s Sheffield born and bred, but he’d see these beautiful sunsets on my Instagram and thought I was living somewhere posh. I think he was a bit disappointed when he found out!
Despite amazing neighbours and beautiful sunsets, the reality of living in the flat was that it was cheaply made and full of mice, and not that great, so not long after, we moved up to S5, because we needed a house as we wanted to start fostering. That changed my life again. It opened up a side of Sheffield I hadn’t seen – the lives of young people who often go unseen. Fostering changed the way I live, the way I work, and deepened my understanding of the city massively. There’s a whole hidden community of young people here who deserve better support.
TRACKS grew out of that same awareness. I taught the cello for many years, which is a very privileged instrument and I’m very privileged to play it, but I often felt I was teaching the ‘haves’: it was just one thing for kids from families from certain socio-economic backgrounds who could access everything – cello, piano, singing, sports, all of it. But for some children it was the one thing they had. It was everything. They didn’t have the same choices.
I was working for The Sheffield Music School, and it felt like it was time for us to fill the gap for another group of children. We started with some Healthy Holidays funding and realised quickly that it wasn’t enough to see kids for a week every half term. They needed somewhere consistent. So we changed everything. We made it free. We fed them. We hoped people would donate, and slowly we built that up and it became TRACKS.
It now runs six days a week. We’re in schools, we run clubs, we’re out in the community, popping up in places where there’s nothing else on offer. We don’t expect people to come to us – we go to them. You can’t do everything from the city centre and expect people to come – you’ve got to get out there into communities. You have to build up trust.
We’ve got an incredible dream team – not just brilliant musicians, but people with lived experience and deep empathy. Some of us are foster carers, some have social care training, many of us are working class and know exactly how hard it can be. Sometimes it feels life-saving, because if everything is going wrong but you’ve one space where you feel safe, then that’s hugely important to these children.
And the music is amazing. These kids are talented. They’re writing songs, performing, recording. They shouldn’t be underestimated because they don’t find mainstream school easy. If you give them the right support, they can succeed.
Earlier this year, Ed Sheeran visited and backed what we’re doing. That was massive. Not just because he’s Ed Sheeran, but because it gave everyone involved – staff, kids, families – a sense of validation. Like, yeah, this matters.
Sheffield has changed since I first came here. There’s more tension these days – more fear, more division. But what hasn’t changed is the fight. People here still care. Still try to put Sheffield on the map creatively. We don’t shout as loud as other cities, but we should. We do things properly. It’s one of the best cities in the country, but you sometimes have to know it to know why – and that’s kind of cool as well. You have to dig a bit to get to the good stuff, and I love that.
As told to Ash Birch
