Changing Seasons

Changing Seasons is a continuing display at Weston Park Museum, in the Sheffield Life and Times Gallery. It's a community-led exhibition that looks at 170 years of Chinese history in Sheffield, a city where people have lived since at least 1855. The community became more visible in the early 20th century through family-run laundries, restaurants and shops, and the display draws on memories, treasured objects and family stories gathered in cross-generation workshops.

It's not a static show, either. The display cases change regularly, so if you've seen it once, it'll be different when you go back. The exhibition runs alongside community festivities like Lion Dance, New Year, Dragon Boat and Mid-Autumn, and it's put together by members of Sheffield's Chinese and British-Chinese community themselves, rather than as a curated look from the outside.

There's a bit of local geography in here too. London Road is the city's unofficial Chinatown, and the early arrivals settled around Highfields, Sharrow, Broomhill and Broomhall. The display is part of a wider outreach initiative that started in 2024 to connect and reconnect hundreds of community members and raise awareness of dementia and associated care services, after language, long working hours, cultural differences and isolation were highlighted as barriers to accessing mainstream health provision.

It launched on Friday 20 February, with the display cases continuing to rotate over the following two years. You'll find it in the Sheffield Life and Times Gallery at Weston Park Museum.