Dun Street

A recent excavation by Wessex Archaeology’s Sheffield team at Dun Street in Sheffield’s Kelham Island industrial quarter, revealed the well-preserved remains of ground floor rooms and vaulted cellars of a block of 19^th century ‘back-to-back’ tenement houses.

 

The cellars represent a range of differing building designs, from standard half width; with one half belonging to the front house and one half to the back, to full width cellars; possibly used as small workshops and communal coal stores. One double-width cellar appears to be the basement of a public house, converted from two pairs of back-to-back houses.

 

The cellars would certainly have been submerged during the Great Sheffield Flood of 1864 and a local story holds that two people (and a donkey) lost their lives in these buildings.