Obvious but not iconic

To: The Editor, Observer Review.
Sir,

Thank you for publishing "One city's towering folly" on Sunday. It is indeed successfully highlighting a distinct imprudence, not that a pair of generic cooling towers that could frankly be anywhere in the UK are going to be demolished, but that Tom James and Go are so pot committed to their wonderful art project falling with the towers.

Tom hits the nail on the head, Sheffield is famous more for things like cutlery and Cocker than for many of the great culture we have going on here, but that isn't going to get better by putting art in a silly building in a part of the city that no-one goes to unless they are shopping at Meadowhall. Given that Sheffield is most famous outside the city for steel and plate, for knifes and forks, for brewing and drinking (we often come up as the "Beer Capital" of Britain in the annual choice and diversity surveys) why not pick a building related to one of these industries currently lying fallow, save it from being made into studio flats and put the art project there? The William Stones brewery lies unused, downsized steel works are ten a penny and there is an added bonus with a number of old cutlery factories that they are next to the Cultural Industries Quarter.

One thing I would say to Tom is that his idea has to be compelling on its own merits, the National Centre for Popular Music showed that an uninteresting attraction won't get more visitors just because you have put it in an architecturally striking building.

Yours,
Tony Kennick

Letter Published

The letter I wrote to Observer Sport Monthly was published. Not to my complete surprise it has ended up being a tiny bit shorter.

Bank on it
I enjoyed last month's cover story right up until the point when Tom Bower stated: 'Football is not a utility or a bank, but part of the fabric of England.' Football has been around in its current form for 150 years. Banking has been 'part of the fabric of England' for three times longer.
Tony Kennick, Sheffield

Letter to the Editor

The Editor
Observer Sport Monthly
via Email

Dear Sir,
I was enjoying last months cover story (The Big Sell Out, August) right up until the penultimate column when Tom Bower stated: "The difference is that football is not a utility or a bank, but part of the fabric of England"

I will briefly mention the argument that people's lives are significantly more at risk from real harm by utility price rises and these companies being run for the benefit of foreign shareholders. If a season ticket is priced out of person's means they have less enjoyment in their lives, if food or financial services are, they could freeze or starve.

The real issue here is to respond on the authors own turf, football being part of our society, especially as the outgoing editor was defending the amount of coverage the sport was getting. For comparison with what follows Football in approximately this form has been part of our lives for 150 years, I can use no other date as I am writing this in Sheffield. Firstly to directly rebut the two sectors Tom mentioned, banking is a difficult one to pin down a starting point on, but the founding of the London Royal Exchange was in 1565 to bring banking services together seems a good point, it implies that there was a significant sector beforehand but it works for my point as it points out banking has been part of the fabric of England for three times longer than football as we know it today. As for utilities, I got as far as a dimly remembered lesson at school about London's water and the New River company in the first two decades of the seventeenth century. Of course the New River was quite literally part of the fabric of the country and around two and a half centuries before the Sheffield Rules.

Casting the net wider, I feel that there is an intrinsic part of British life that is under far greater threat than football, having been with us for hundreds of years, massively popular with all sectors of society since the middle ages and with the oldest extant company dating from 1698. Brewing in this country has come under sustained, well financed attack recently. We should be campaigning loudly for the American, Belgian and other foreign money out of brewing because of the risk to the performance of our native beer styles.

After all the worst case scenario for the foreign money in football is an under-performing England team and that sounds no different from all the years where the top flight clubs were owned by our citizens does it?

Tony Kennick
(Address Supplied)