Much has been written about Sheffield’s Page Hall in recent years, a suburb made up of crowded streets north of the city centre.
It has become infamous for street fights, Covid lockdown breaches, and litter piling up on the streets. It is one of the poorest areas of Sheffield, where educational expectations and employment levels are low.
However, it is home to a multicultural population with one of the largest sections consisting of Slovak Roma, many of whom immigrated to Sheffield after Slovakia joined the EU in 2004. I was honored to be invited to visit Page Hall with David Kandrac. a Roma consultant and interpreter and a Sheffield City Council learning mentor supporting Roma youth.
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Before heading to Page Hall, I met David and his wife at their home in Crookes; moved to Crookes with his wife and children in 2019, however he says finding a landlord willing to rent them a property was not easy, but his qualifications, as well as references from colleagues and enough in his wallet to cover a very high deposit helped.
He said: “Being a Roma, especially coming from Page Hall, I was turned down twice. I can’t prove it was because I was a Romani, but the properties were still available after the turnout.”
While I was there I was treated to a Roma style coffee which certainly helped my conversational powers and energy levels to say the least. As we chatted, the family, eager to show the ignorant Englishman a little about gypsy culture, played a YouTube video of the gypsy hymn Gelem Gelem, by Slovak-Roma artist Jan Pohlodko.
It’s quite difficult when you ask a Roma person to describe what encapsulates their culture to get a definitive answer, possibly because they have never had a country of origin of their own, having migrated across Europe in a diaspora dating back more than a thousand years.
However, David’s cousin-in-law Jiruna, 51, says ‘singing and dancing’ plays an important role, while the most traditional food still eaten by Slovak Roma adults is Halusky, a dumpling stew. with meat, cabbage and cheese, which most children in the community now reject in favor of pizza or other more western foods.
A gypsy flag was established in 1971, while International Gypsy Day is commemorated on April 8 and the community passes down ancient crafts such as basketry between generations.
There is undeniably a lot of negativity going around on the subject of Page Hall, but the people I met through David were very warm and friendly.
Zdenka, 38, a Slovak gypsy lady whom David introduced me to on Page Hall’s Firth Park Road, said Christian Mission Immanuel Church, based at the nearby Firth Park Working Mens Club, had helped provide a focal point for community. She said: “Many of us used to drink a lot, but our church has helped us live a good and decent life.”
David, 31, described how Page Hall’s Roma people, many of whom are from the east central town of Bystrany, where he himself hails from, view Sheffield as a “safe, equal and fair place”. Unlike his old home. He added: “Words cannot describe their experience at home – most of them race to Sheffield. Basically everything is so much better for them.”
The father of three, drawing on his own experiences in Bystrany, describes how in Slovakia children are educated in Roma-only schools, where “expectations are low and the quality of lessons is poor.” He said: “It is a very segregated place where children are educated separately, only with children who speak Romani.”
However, he says that most teachers in these Roma-only schools describe their students as Slovak. Romani dialects are an “unofficial”, unwritten form of communication.
David said: “The way we live our lives was never accepted, probably never will be, we’re just too wild, freaky, loud sociable community.”
The Romani language consists of more than 60 dialects, however the main dialect spoken in Page Hall is Slovak-Roma. Most of Page Hall’s Roma community comes from the villages of Bystrany and Zehra and most Page Hall residents grew up and went to school together in Slovakia.
Most of the Roma I spoke to (generously translated by David) described their life “at home” as ghetto “settlements” with no running water or sanitation. While nightly curfews often prevented them from entering city centers
Josef, 52, who did not want to give his last name, like most of the Roma I met, said: “We are grateful that here we can live freely, express ourselves fully and live in peace. The way we were represented in Slovakia had many prejudices I have family in Slovakia who live in absolute poverty compared to what we have here: we work here and have a life.
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“We feel free here, we know everyone and we can hang out. I’m very happy that my children can grow up and go to school here.” David’s cousin Ludovit, 48, said: “It’s a different system, the way we live in Slovakia than here, but a lot of things from Slovakia seem to have been adopted here.”
“When we escape the country we feel free, but they imitate the system by putting all the Roma in the same place. We have jobs with minimum wages and we pay very high rents.”
David says it’s not uncommon for private landlords to charge £800 for two- and three-bedroom houses without central heating in Page Hall.
Ludovit added: “I worry that we have the same system here. I have traveled a lot around England to different cities. Everywhere I go there are Roma ghettos.” Ludovit, like David, eventually left Page Hall and now lives in Crookes.
Much has been said about the problem of litter on the streets of Page Hall and as you walk there are certain roads where it is still a problem, although the main center and shops around Firth Park Road are certainly not the dump you would expect. has been described. previously.
Jiruna, 51, whom I met at David’s house with his wife, moved to Crookes with her husband Ludovit a couple of years ago.
She says that much of the problem stems from systemic poverty in Slovakia. She said: “I feel repressed because one of the reasons we moved from Slovakia is to get away from the insults, the attacks and the negativity. What we have in Page Hall is similar, it’s trying to bring everyone together. Not everyone They are equal”.
“We don’t want to live the same way we lived in Slovakia, at home we were in the ghetto and we didn’t have bins. All the waste was going outside the house. These are old habits and now we have a new generation of children.” .”
He added that now that Roma communities in Slovakia are being empowered with mayors, community leaders are in charge of sanitation and he hopes that will have a ripple effect in the UK towns and cities to which they have migrated.
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David emigrated to England from Bystrany, Slovakia, in 2004. He, his brother and his mother joined their father in Cardiff, who had been in South Wales for a few months before, working and saving enough money to bring his family to the UK. Speaking of his arrival in Wales in 2004, David recalls being in Year 9 with “very limited” English and not speaking proper Romany or Slovak.
However, it is fair to say that David’s attempts at adaptation were doomed to fail. Within months of starting high school, David was permanently shut out. He admits that he was ‘very violent’ and a ‘totally different’ person than he is now. The father of three, who is now studying for a master’s degree in psychology and education, ended up completely marginalized and falling into substance abuse.
However, her life changed after the family moved to Sheffield in 2007. After starting work in a Page Hall convenience store, she studied literacy and mathematics before entering Health and Social Care at Hillsborough College and eventually becoming teaching assistant at Whiteways Primary School and going on to work for Sheffield City Council as a learning mentor.
Ultimately, she hopes to apply for a Doctor of Education and Child Psychology training and aspires to give back to her community. He said: “Education can make a difference in my community, especially for the new generations.”
In a final word on Page Hall, he added: “In Page Hall there are people from the most deprived areas of Slovakia, but there are other Roma in Tinsley, Darnall, Rotherham. Page Hall has the highest concentration of people from the most deprived areas.” If I go to poor housing estates where English people live, there will be alcohol abuse, drug abuse, homelessness and involvement of social services.
“If I were to focus on these areas, how much negativity would I find?”
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