Jackie described Clare’s life as “a spiral” – spiralling, like she danced. “She used sex and love as a crutch to prove that her life meant something.” She would go dancing in thigh-length boots and hot pants. When she was young Clare craved love, Jackie said. Penny asked, “Did you love Clare?” Jackie said yes. She says Clare loved the proposal, “Best thing anyone’s ever done for her.” Clare was living alone with her two boys, a toddler and a baby, when she met Jason. We met Jackie, Clare’s half-sister, in what she calls her “bubble” on another hill in the city. There were so many things we couldn’t say. Janet said: “She was going to marry him but circumstances…” She asked me to turn off the recorder. Tim thought the graffiti was a nonsense: “Graffiti on a listed building!” They weren’t in touch with the man who’d written the proposal. His ex-wife Janet joined us there, and they talked about Clare, dark-skinned and skinny, doing cross-stitch, reading Catherine Cookson, being happy, going clubbing. Tim, now single, keeps a very clean house on a red-brick estate and his front garden is full of blooming white pot plants. He was a Hell’s Angel when he married Janet. Tim has Love and Hate tattooed on to his knuckles. ‘There has been incredible change at Park Hill’: the grade II-listed flats as they are today. That Easter, 2011, I got an email from Tim Middleton: “Regarding your article in the Sheffield Star… Clare Middleton was my step-daughter.” It turned out to be the nursery where Clare Middleton played as a child. I recorded children in the playground of the nursery on Park Hill. On the bridge I recorded wind, trams, sirens: “There’s always a siren,” Jason said when we finally met him. She asked around, because it seemed an intoxicated act, that proposal. But none of the brides who descended that way was Clare.Īn artist called Emilie Taylor used to watch drug users snake under the graffiti when she worked on the Needle Exchange van that parked under the bridge. He told Penny that brides rode down to their weddings in the estate’s service lifts so that their big frocks didn’t squash. He did remember “one or two house burnings on Park Hill but most of them’s been by accident”. But not the graffiti man.Ī fork-lift driver had heard it was a love triangle and the person who wrote it had his flat burned out by the other bloke. The Park Hill caretaker, Grenville Squires, said not: 26 other people did jump off the bridge, one of whom Grenville heard yell “help” just before he jumped. There was one story that Clare Middleton said no to the proposal, so her spurned lover had jumped off the bridge. I trawled local news archives and we chased up rumours. I rhapsodised to the local paper, The Star, hoping that we would uncover a romance. I asked film-maker Penny Woolcock to work with me on a documentary for Radio 4, a quest to find the real lovers behind the graffiti. One day in 2010, I looked up and wondered who the lovers were and whether Clare said yes. Or that Urban Splash had replicated the proposal on T-shirts for their launch party and one of the Arctic Monkeys wore one on stage in America. He didn’t know that Professor Jeremy Till, then at the University of Sheffield, jauntily displayed a replica of the bridge at the 2006 Venice Biennale of Architecture. Jason didn’t know his proposal had become something else. “She had difficulty expressing love’: Clare Middleton as a young woman.
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