Welcome to Kelham Island Walks from its founder Anders

From quite a young age I wanted to be a tour guide. As I am naturally quite a shy person that seems surprising, but I’ve always loved learning bits of trivia and unusual and surprising facts and then sharing them with other people. But I’ve also always been fascinated by history, not the dates (I still need to think hard to remember them) but the stories that bring a place to life. And so wherever I’ve lived I’ve sought them out and wanted to really understand what makes a place tick and how it ended up the way it is today. I guess I’ve always been a bit geeky about history, maps and geography.

So when I moved to Kelham Island in the middle of 2012 I wanted to know more about the place I’d come to live in. Not finding any suitable books other than general histories I started doing my own research finding out all sorts from books, maps, photographs, historic documents, old newspaper articles, internet searches, and just through chatting to people. I then started sharing some of with my neighbours and friends around Kelham Island and Neepsend. That led to me being asked one day by the chair of the local community group to help with a tour he was doing as part of a study visit for a conference at Sheffield University.

Anders leading a walking tour of Kelham Island and Neepsend for the Mistra Urban Futures Annual International Conference held at the University of Sheffield in 2019. Picture: Alex Payling

The reaction to that initial walk snowballed and some great feedback led to me to decide to get organised and the result is Kelham Island Walks. Whilst my regular walk is just around Kelham Island itself, I consider Neepsend also part of my patch. I also know a fair bit about West Bar and Sheffield city centre too. So I’m hoping that one day Kelham Island Walks becomes much more than just my local patch. But being my local patch, Kelham Island and Neepsend is where my heart is and I know it inside out. At the moment this is also part-time with me still needing to hold down my main job.

Sadly, just as I had got organised coronavirus appeared and put a hold on everything, but that’ll only be temporary. I hope if anything our daily exercise during lockdown has made us all more curious about the places around us and afterwards it will make us all want to get out and explore a bit more in the fresh air.

Finally, and at the risk of this sounding like a poor man’s Oscars ceremony I want to thank a few people who have helped me get Kelham Island Walks to where it is now… Ben McGarry and Simon Wigglesworth-Baker, the Chair and Vice-Chair respectively of Kelham Island & Neepsend Community Alliance (KINCA) who got me in to doing my first walk and gave me lots of encouragement; all my other friends and neighbours around the area (AKA the Sundowners) who’ve really encouraged me to do this but also despaired when I’ve spent ages agonising over what to call it and how to set up a website and design a logo; Robin Widdowson an experienced tour leader who I’ve worked with on the KIN walking programme through which we aim to get local residents exploring places within easy reach of Kelham Island and which we kicked off with a trial run of my walk; Liz Godfrey from Sheffield Heritage Open Days who enthused about my walk and persuaded me to put it on as part of their annual programme of events; Sophie Barber of Kelham Island Food Tours who met with me and gave some great advice on how to get organised and raise my profile; Chris Keady and Brooke Shipley from Kelham Island Museum who have been keen to work with me from the start and given me access to the museum’s resources to do more research; and last but not least David Tucker from London Walks who despite not having met me before was another enthusiast for my tours and was prepared to give the endorsement of London’s oldest walking tours company whose own walks partly inspired me to be a tour guide in the first place.

Anders Hanson
Founder, owner, guide, creator, web-designer, marketeer, and everything else for Kelham Island Walks