Sheffield Trivia
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48 free Sheffield trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Sheffield has been known for its knives since the Middle Ages, gave the world stainless steel and cast steel, and then turned its empty works into a city of music venues, climbing walls and a snooker theatre the whole sport refuses to leave. It is also the greenest big city in England, with open moorland inside its boundary. These 48 questions cover the steelmakers and cutlers, Sheffield Wednesday and Sheffield United, the Crucible's finest nights, the bands from Arctic Monkeys and Pulp to the synth-pop pioneers, the films shot on the city's streets, the athletes, scientists and politicians it raised, and the sauce every local swears by. Each answer comes with a one-line explanation that adds something worth repeating. Play it on your phone for instant answers, or print it for a pub quiz round, a classroom or a long drive over the Snake Pass.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Sheffield residents were arrested in the 2010s for trying to stop the council removing what from their streets?
Trees
Trees were being felled in their thousands under a street-maintenance contract, and a government minister accused the council of 'environmental vandalism' in a city that counts some 4.5 million of them.
Q 02Sheffield's Harry Brearley hit on stainless steel in 1913 while trying to make longer-lasting what?
Gun barrels
Gun barrels were eroding too quickly for an arms maker, so Brearley tried adding chromium to steel at the Brown Firth laboratories and found an alloy that also refused to rust.
Q 03Which 1997 comedy about six jobless Sheffield men forming a striptease act was nominated for the Best Picture Oscar?
The Full Monty
The Full Monty won an Oscar for its score. Its actors agreed to strip for real in the final scene on condition that the director filmed it in a single take.
Q 04Which sweets from Sheffield's Bassett's were reportedly invented in 1899 when a salesman dropped a tray of samples?
Liquorice Allsorts
Liquorice Allsorts were a happy accident, the story goes: the jumbled samples so impressed a Leicester shopkeeper that he ordered the mix as it lay, and it became the firm's signature sweet.
Q 05Sheffield band Pulp's frontman was detained after invading the stage during whose performance at the 1996 Brit Awards?
Michael Jackson
Michael Jackson was singing 'Earth Song' surrounded by children when the Pulp singer ran on in protest; police questioned him over an alleged assault on the child performers, and he was never prosecuted.
Q 06Which Sheffield-born chemist became the first Briton in space after answering a radio advert?
Helen Sharman
Helen Sharman, then a chemist at the chocolate maker Mars, answered an advert for an astronaut that promised 'no experience necessary', and was picked from about 13,000 applicants to fly to the Mir space station.
Q 07Which Sheffield rock band's drummer, Rick Allen, kept playing after losing an arm in a 1984 crash near the city?
Def Leppard
Def Leppard waited for their drummer, who learned to play a customised electronic kit on which pedals under his left foot do the work of the missing arm.
Q 08Unlike most Worcestershire sauces, Sheffield's Henderson's Relish is made without which ingredient?
Anchovies
Anchovies go into Lea & Perrins but not Henderson's, which is approved for vegetarians. A London MP who called its look-alike bottle 'parasitic' in Parliament in 2014 was invited to eat his words over a meal with a bottle of it.
Q 09Which Sheffield club, founded in 1857, does FIFA recognise as the world's oldest football club?
Sheffield F.C.
Sheffield F.C. is six years older than the Football Association itself, yet it now plays in non-league football, far below the two big clubs that the city is known for.
Q 10The 1989 Hillsborough disaster in Sheffield struck an FA Cup semi-final between Liverpool and which club?
Nottingham Forest
Nottingham Forest were the opponents on 15 April 1989, when a crush killed 97 Liverpool supporters in the deadliest disaster in British sporting history; the inquiry that followed made top grounds all-seater.
Q 11What nickname, a nod to the city's cutlery trade, do Sheffield United carry?
The Blades
The Blades was once a name for any Sheffield side, Wednesday included. United began as the Cutlers and took the Blades for their own after their rivals had settled on another name.
Q 12Which Sheffield ground staged the world's first floodlit football match, back in 1878?
Bramall Lane
Bramall Lane tried out electric light on an exhibition game between sides picked as the Reds and the Blues, and is now the oldest ground in the world still staging professional football.
Q 13Sheffield United was founded in 1889 by a club that already bore the name and played which sport?
Cricket
Q 21Which Arctic Monkeys debut single went straight to UK number one in October 2005?
I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor
I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor went straight in at number one because fans already knew it: the band had given away demo CDs at gigs, and the songs had been passed around online.
Q 22Arctic Monkeys' 2006 track 'Mardy Bum' takes its name from a northern English dialect word meaning what?
Sulky
Sulky or moody is what 'mardy' means across the North and Midlands; the word probably began as 'marred', in the sense of a spoilt child.
Q 23Arctic Monkeys' debut album title quotes which Alan Sillitoe novel, filmed in 1960 with Albert Finney?
Cricket came first. When Wednesday walked out of the cricket club's ground in a row over money, Sheffield United Cricket Club formed a football side of its own to win back the lost income.
Q 14Sheffield Wednesday beat Manchester United in the 1991 League Cup final while playing in which tier?
Second Division
Second Division Wednesday won 1–0 through John Sheridan under Ron Atkinson, the manager Manchester United had sacked in 1986, and won promotion back to the top flight in the same season.
Q 15Sheffield United fans' 'Greasy Chip Butty' chant borrows the tune of which John Denver hit?
Annie's Song
Annie's Song, a love ballad Denver wrote for his wife, lends its tune to a list of Sheffield pleasures: Magnet beer, Woodbine cigarettes, snuff and a greasy chip butty.
Q 16Sheffield Wednesday's stadium carried which district's name until 1914, when it became Hillsborough?
Owlerton
Owlerton, then a village beyond the city boundary, is also why Sheffield Wednesday are the Owls: the nickname followed the club's move to its new ground there.
Q 17Which Canadian made the first maximum 147 break in World Championship history at Sheffield's Crucible in 1983?
Cliff Thorburn
Cliff Thorburn began the break with a fluked red, and play on the other table stopped so that his friend and fellow Canadian Bill Werbeniuk could watch him finish it.
Q 18Who beat Steve Davis on the final black of the 1985 World Snooker final at Sheffield's Crucible?
Dennis Taylor
Dennis Taylor had trailed 8–0 before winning on the last ball after midnight, watched by 18.5 million people, an audience that set records for BBC2 and for British television at that hour.
Q 19Who compiled the fastest maximum break in snooker history, 5 minutes 8 seconds, at Sheffield's Crucible in 1997?
Ronnie O'Sullivan
Ronnie O'Sullivan's break was listed for twenty years at 5 minutes 20 seconds, until a 2017 check of the television footage showed the clock had been started too early.
Q 20Snooker's World Championship is played at Sheffield's Crucible in front of a crowd of roughly what size?
980
Just 980 people fit into the Crucible, none of them more than about 20 metres from the table, and a rebuild agreed in 2026 is set to add up to 500 seats.
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning has its factory-worker hero say the line that became the title, and Alex Turner said the book's own name fitted an album about nights out and mornings after.
Q 24Which 1995 Pulp single about a Greek art student at Saint Martin's reached number two in the UK chart?
Common People
Common People's heroine has never been confirmed, but in 2015 an Athens newspaper suggested she was Danae Stratou, a former Saint Martin's student married to Greece's finance minister of the day.
Q 25Which Sheffield synth-pop band's 'Don't You Want Me' held the UK number one for five weeks over Christmas 1981?
The Human League
The Human League found its two singers when Phil Oakey spotted teenagers Joanne Catherall and Susan Ann Sulley dancing at the Crazy Daisy club on Sheffield's High Street.
Q 26Which Sheffield-born former gas fitter took 'With a Little Help from My Friends' to UK number one in 1968?
Joe Cocker
Joe Cocker rebuilt the Beatles' sing-along as a slow, howling soul number, and sang it at Woodstock the following summer with the screams and flailing arms that became his trademark.
Q 27Richard Hawley's Mercury-nominated album Coles Corner is named after a Sheffield lovers' meeting spot outside what?
A department store
A department store, Cole Brothers, gave the corner its name; the shop moved away in 1963, but the name outlived it, and a plaque now marks the spot.
Q 28Which 1984 BBC film written by Barry Hines follows two Sheffield families through a nuclear attack and its aftermath?
Threads
Threads grew out of its director's earlier documentary A Guide to Armageddon, and went out a year before the BBC finally showed The War Game, a nuclear film it had shelved since the 1960s.
Q 29Which Sheffield-born actor played Boromir in The Lord of the Rings and Ned Stark in Game of Thrones?
Sean Bean
Sean Bean, a devoted Sheffield United supporter, got to play for the club on screen in the 1996 film When Saturday Comes, as a brewery worker scouted by the team.
Q 30Which member of the Python comedy team was born in Ranmoor, Sheffield, in 1943 and attended Birkdale School?
Michael Palin
Michael Palin went from Birkdale to Shrewsbury School, as his father had, and then to Oxford, where he met Terry Jones and began the writing partnership that led to Python.