Redressing the balance. (UK Forum: Sheffield).

Sheffield may not top many people's list of centres of new media, but it's been incubating Internet businesses since the mid-1990s and is keen to promote the city's benefits as a location for online enterprise. Michael Nutley asks local Web players what they are.

SHEFFIELD IS THE CITY THAT NEW media forgot. While clusters have developed in other northern cities like Leeds and Manchester, where local authorities and regional development groups have replaced traditional industries with emerging ones, in the late 1990s Sheffield was seen only as the setting for The Full Monty.

According to Martin Manning, director of the Cultural Industries Quarter Agency (CIQA), there's a certain irony to this. "Sheffield has a 20-year history of being aware of the potential of the creative industries," he says. "It was one of the first cities that established a cultural industries quarter, in the early 1980s when some pioneering artists called the Yorkshire Art Space Society were looking for cheap space in the city centre.

"The city council didn't have much money, but started to selectively invest in workspace initiatives. The major development was The Workstation, which is now managed workspace for 50-60 businesses, or around 250 people."

Tina Carr, director of communications at training specialist The Workshop, highlights another influence on Sheffield's development. "The software company Sanderson is probably responsible for creating a lot of the other companies in Sheffield," she says. "It's formed a little cluster of e-learning companies, including ACT, Digibrain and ourselves, that are now winning big government contracts and leading the world in this area."

Pip Thorne, co-founder of agency Technophobia, puts a lot of the blame for Sheffield's slow start in new media down to tensions between central and local government during the Thatcher years. …