🎭 Excitedly awaiting ‘Standing at the Sky’s Edge’, which claims to be ‘the best British musical in decades’.

A friend reports that it is indeed very good. Plus it has some personal novelty value.

It’s set in a big imposing block of flats in Sheffield called Park Hill, which I basically lived opposite to in earlier life. It was an imposing 1960s block of an architecturally brutalist nature. Sadly I never witnessed much in the way of singing or dancing emanating from that direction back then.

In fact, the flats were unfortunately a little infamous at the time. Although certainly not as bad as the area apparently was pre-skyscraper-construction in the 1930s, at which point it was spitefully known as ‘Little Chicago’ due to the excessive rate of violent crime.

Roundabouts the time I left the area the residents had mostly been dispersed. Unfortunately not all that willingly for some I understood back then, so perhaps ‘evicted’ is a better term in some cases Some fancy developer was busy enacting its vision for a bright new (I assume gentrified) future for the structure, although it being a listed building they couldn’t do too much to its overall size and shape.

Nonetheless, I don’t know what hallucinogens the re-designers had taken when constructing their modern day Park Hill mood board; but I think I remember some artists' impressions of what we were to supposedly look forward to featuring much in the way of rainbow colours and the occasional flamingo roaming throughout the grounds of their modern-day take on utopian streets in the sky.