Sheffield is 'greenest city' in the north as 18 parks awarded Green Flags
The South Yorkshire city beat Nottingham, Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool and Newcastle.
Last updated 2nd Jul 2025
Sheffield has achieved the highest number of Green Flag awards for city parks among seven northern and Midlands cities.
The city won 18 awards for parks, woodlands and green spaces in 2024-25, beating Nottingham, Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool and Newcastle.
The achievement was reported to Sheffield City Council’s communities, parks and leisure committee yesterday (June 30).
The committee is starting to receive regular reports on standards of all the services that it oversees. These include parks, leisure services, libraries, bereavement operations and youth and communities services.
The percentage of city public spaces that are maintained to a Sheffield standard set by the council was 85% in 2024-25. The aim is for all publicly accessible green open space under council stewardship to meet the standard by 2030.
The target set for 2025/26 is 88%. Performance in this area has seen a 10% increase over the last two years, said a report to councillors.
The recent focus has been on improving allotments and woodlands and sites in east, south-east and north-east Sheffield are being targeted in 2025/26.
The major achievement reported for sport, leisure and events venues was the handover of facility management to Everyone Active in January. ASM Global has taken over managing the Utilita Arena and Sheffield City Hall.
The report added: “Alongside our community leisure operators, we have successfully secured external grants of over £300,000 to support environmental interventions at Stocksbridge Community Leisure Centre, Zest and King Edwards Swimming Pools, including the installation of solar panels and pool covers to reduce carbon output.”
The figures for the city’s 11 council-run hub libraries, the Central Library and City Archives show that there were just over 960,000 visits in total. This is almost a 10% increase on 2023/24, when visits totalled 877,000. Another 16 libraries are run by volunteers.
The report said that before Covid this figure was just over 1.05m visits per year. It dropped significantly when the restrictions were removed but continues to rise again year on year.
More than 770,000 books and other items were borrowed from council-run libraries over the past year. The report said: “This dropped by around 28,000 since the previous year (2023/24) and 90% of this decrease was linked to lower borrowing over the summer months.
“To improve this, we are focused on increasing engagement with the summer reading challenge which is aimed at children and young people over the six-week summer holidays to promote reading out of school. We also monitor the number of items borrowed from the shared Library Service catalogue via our volunteer-run libraries.
“Including these items shows total 939,000 books were borrowed across all 28 libraries in Sheffield.”
Use of the online e-library surged during the pandemic, with more than 300,000 digital loans recorded in 2020/21. This compares to around 290,000 loans of e-books, e-audio and e-magazines in 2024/25.
The report said that the recent growth is largely because of a change in how e-magazine loans are counted, rather than a resurgence in e-book or e-audio borrowing, which is actually declining. Work is taking place to look at how to reverse this decrease.
Public access to 210 desktop computers in city libraries has seen an 8.4 percentage point increase over three years, the report said. The system is being revamped so that in libraries where desktop usage is consistently low, some of the space will be changed to create flexible hot-desking areas.
Libraries where demand remains high demand will continue to offer their access to desktop computer facilities.