Today, Sheffield’s East End is mostly gone. Its streets and terraced houses have been demolished. The men, women and children who populated its soot-blackened neighbourhoods, huddled beneath the looming, thundering steelworks, have been scattered to newer housing developments. The seemingly endless landscape of steelworks and coal pits has also been consigned to memory. While the steel makers Forgemasters and Outokumpu remain, the land surrounding them has been cleared of their illustrious forebears and no longer teems with their workers. Light industries, retail parks and leisure outlets have taken their place. Attercliffe Road, once the main artery of a proudly self-contained district boasting its own schools, churches, pubs and even a department store, now accommodates little to please the eye of the passing observer. The constant bustle of thousands of workers maintaining a twenty-four-hour, three-shift system no longer fills the air with the clanging of trams, the clatter of bicycles and the scrape of hobnail boots on flagstones.

The first half of the twentieth century is often characterised as a period of economic, political and moral collapse among European nations. Widespread ultra-nationalism, racist and eugenic theories, anti-Semitism, imperialism and world war are all closely and inseparably linked with the period. The rise of fascism across Europe had its British analogue in the Blackshirts of Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, notorious for organising and marching for a ‘Greater Britain’ and in defence of the Empire, within working-class districts.1 Indeed the sporadic rioting and disorder which accompanied the Blackshirts’ attempt to march through London’s East End, together with the race riots that took place in a number of British ports in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, are viewed as symptomatic of the febrile atmosphere of racial tension during the inter-war period in Britain. ‘Hitlerism’, as the philosopher Hannah Arendt noted in January 1944, exercised its strong international and inter-European appeal during the 1930s ‘because racism, although a state doctrine only in Germany, had been everywhere a powerful trend in public opinion’.2