Sheffield’s best smoking area: Vote now

Sheffield is a city where, despite it being freezing cold for three quarters of the year, we students still flock outside to the smoking area on nights out, even if we've never so much as puffed on a cig in our lives.

After much deliberation, debate and discussion, we have narrowed down our shortlist to the five best smoking areas in Sheffield. It's been a long, hard journey, but we got there.

Place your vote at the bottom of the page. Voting closes on Saturday 7th October at midnight.

The Tuesday Club

The place where there are allegedly more narcotics and pharmaceuticals than Boots the chemist.

If you’re attending one of Tuesday Club’s events, you may at one point find yourselves needing to battle your way through the jungle that is the corridor and make your way to the cramped smoking ‘area’. Here, you’ll be all squished in together like a tin of tightly packed sardines, whilst you carefully try to light your cig without setting everyone’s highly flammable Ellesse jumpers on fire.

However, in this smoking area lies an unknown depth, a philosophical awakening, if you will. Speak to any person in that smoking area, and you will well and truly 'find yourself'. Speak to the guy in the rainbow coloured tunic and wearing sandals – he will enlighten your life about all manner of subjects. Or speak to the naive glitter-coloured raver who thinks she’s a fairy. From the outside, she doesn’t look like much of a Freud or an Aristotle, and she will talk to you in gobbledygoop, but, somehow, it will make sense.

West Street Live

The chances are you won’t remember a great amount of the time you have spent in West Street Live, let alone its smoking area. However, it’s a place where memories are made, numbers are exchanged and minute-long friendships formed. Yes, everyone is absolutely mangled, but it serves to make people much friendlier.

You’ll hear at least one person’s life story, or a lengthy description of the band they’re in, or have a full conversation with a total stranger about where you’ve been on holiday. You’ll be asked if you’ve “got a light” at least three times.

WSL’s smoking area offers the ideal respite for your body and soul after too many schit bombs. It also presents a panoramic view of West Street at 3am – expect David Attenborough documentary type scenes – and the chance to laugh at those turned away for being too drunk. You won’t remember it, but what a place.

Code

It may not be the prettiest but boy is it the most entertaining. You’ll probably down a VK or two and listen to a couple of songs inside Code before somehow you find yourself descending the outside stairs to join the chaos in the smoking area.

It’s a strange place where any rivalry between Hallam and Uni of students is suspended, a kind of neutral zone, if you will. You probably wouldn’t speak to Jake doing sport science at Hallam in any other circumstance, but suddenly half an hour has passed and you’ve lost all you friends, but you now know that your new friend has two sisters and is graduating next year.

Unlike the SU and many of the clubs in Sheffield, Code’s smoking area is massive and this makes it the perfect place to enjoy some ‘fresh air’ or contemplate how smashed you are already. It’s highly likely you’ll spend more of your night outside rather than inside but lets not lie, Code’s smoking area is where the real party is at.

Corp

Complete with a questionable food van and even more questionable people, Corp smoking area is where everything worth talking about on a night out happens. Look out for the people collapsing in to the barriers or falling down the concrete steps, having to make the heartbreaking decision between saving their pint or their chips and eventually landing on both.

And if you don't see at least five people you know and hoped never to see again, you're just too smashed to recognise them. The mean girls style cliques dotted about also make good viewing, from rockers to roadmen and the odd love island reject, all hovering around the lone smoker of the group like a puppy waiting to be offered a bit of sandwich.

If you can dodge the bouncers looming ominously near the exit and not get a blue pint launched in your hair, it’s hands down the most unique and memorable smoking area experience in Sheff.

The Leadmill

Leadmill smoking area

We could sum up an argument as to why The Leadmill has the best smoking area in Sheffield with one statement – Leadmill has Nev.

But for the basis of debate and to really cement why Leadmill has the best smoking area in Sheffield, I'll say a few other words. Leadmill's smoking area is a stones throw away from McDonald's, so not only can you smell alcohol, sweat, and smoke, you can also smell the food you'll inevitably be eating in about two hours time.

On top of this, Leadmill's smoking area has more skinny jeans per square meter than any other place in the world, and if you spend enough time there you'll find yourself connected to the psychic wavelength where regular Leadmill goers communicate solely in Arctic Monkeys lyrics.

But to get back to the main argument, Leadmill has Nev, and that is why it was the best smoking area in Sheffield.