The future of Sheffield’s urban woodland? Stakeholder perceptions of urban woodland management change in Sheffield

This thesis examines the historical evolution of urban woodland management in the city of Sheffield from the the late nineteenth century to the present. As one of the greenest and most wooded cities in Europe, Sheffield provides a particularly valuable case through which to explore how urban woodlands have been managed, valued, and contested over time. Across this period, woodlands shifted from estate-based and productive landscapes to municipally managed amenity spaces, and more recently to multifunctional sites expected to deliver biodiversity, recreation, heritage, health, and climate-related benefits. Yet these changing ambitions were not matched evenly by local capacity, and many sites experienced long periods of neglect, fragmented management, and uneven investment.

The thesis addresses a gap in existing scholarship, which has tended to focus either on ecological dimensions or on national forestry policy, while paying less attention to the long-term translation of policy into site-level practice and to the role of stakeholder perceptions in shaping management. To address this gap, this research adopts a mixed-methods case study approach, combining archival research, document analysis, site visits, participatory observation, and semi-structured interviews. The analysis is guided by an adapted place-keeping framework, which provides a structured way of examining the interaction between governance, policy, funding, partnership, maintenance, and evaluation over time.

The thesis shows that urban woodland management in Sheffield did not develop through a simple linear progression, but through uneven shifts in management paradigms, institutional arrangements, and public expectations. It argues that contemporary woodland governance is shaped not by policy ambition alone, but by the local mechanisms through which policy, resources, maintenance, and public participation are translated into practice. In doing so, the thesis contributes a historically grounded and governance-sensitive account of urban woodland management, with implications for more durable and equitable woodland governance in Sheffield and comparable cites.