Mohsin Farmanieh and his wife Fatemeh opened Toranj in the Moor Market in June 2021. COVID-19 made it a challenging time to open a new business, but far from being held back, the pair were keen to expand into a high street shop front.
Having been named one of the 51 coolest neighbourhoods in the world by TimeOut last year, Sheffield's Kelham Island continues to attract more positive press, as The Sunday Times has now named it one of their Best Places to Live in the UK in their 2023 guide.
From the largest urban glass house in Europe to the largest theatre complex outside of London, there's lots to experience in Sheffield, The Outdoor City.
Julian Gjini bought his café on Abbeydale Road when there were hardly any thriving businesses in the area, and has watched the independent business community grow to the point where Tesco is almost the only chain store on the street.
Alexis Moschopoulos came up with the idea for Grobotic Systems as an academic in the field of plant science. He felt the that the expensive and inefficient equipment he had to use to grow plants for experiments was holding back progress in his field. After several years of discussion and experimentation with his friend Richard Banks, an electronics engineer and maker, the pair founded Grobotic Systems in 2018.
ITM Power partnered with The University of Sheffield – world renowned for its expertise in energy innovation – to plan and fund a National Hydrogen Research Innovation and Skills Centre. It’s here they’ll research the safe and efficient manufacturing of hydrogen using low or zero carbon sources of energy.
As David puts it, “You know when you’re struggling with formatting in Word or Google Docs, and you end up wanting to throw your laptop out of the window in frustration? Papermill lets you focus on the content: you write what you want to, drop in other bits like images, tell Papermill what you want it to look like, and it does the rest.”
Sheffield and the wider South Yorkshire region is now home to 58 breweries, more per head of population than anywhere else in the country, producing around 1,800 different beers every year.
A Universal Basic Income, or UBI Lab is a citizen-led group exploring and advocating for Universal Basic Income. What many people don't know - even if they might have heard about UBI as a concept - is that it is borne out of Sheffield and facilitated by the social enterprise Opus.
An annual ranking of the Top 25 Cities in the UK (outside of London) for starting a business, the Startups Cities Index is the most exhaustive research project of its kind. Sheffield was revealed as the ultimate winner, thanks to the city’s strong performance across business support, talent attraction, low cost of living, large working population and fantastic transport links.