Sheffield’s former central fire station will soon be demolished to make way for redevelopment. This is a major part of the Sevenstone plan for the city centre, which will bring a greater number of shops into the empty spaces via a half billion pound mixture of Liverpool One outdoor style shopping complexes and more familiar American Mall style structures. The monetary and civic values of this project are highly debatable. As of now, however, only demolition of the fire station will take place, as the development has stalled indefinitely. Once the fire station has gone, Sheffield city centre will be left with a giant hole.

When writing about architecture it is all too easy to rant, to hang on to pointless symbolism; it is difficult to be earnest. Yet, right now, the situation is absurd. In truth, the overall historic and architectural value of the building is dubious. It may not necessarily be worth keeping in the long term. But due to immediate and extreme conditions it is worth considering how the city around us becomes valued in the face of irrational demands. The economy and the decline of a city and its industries are the basis of planning and the irregular, incoherent paths they follow can make for exciting places. Yet with the encroachment of master-plans and urban corporations, ahem Hammersons, comes a demise of the urban – the things that make a city a city.

The fire station is a case and point. Its future is defined by an extreme narrative of decline and redevelopment that orders its destruction. Intriguingly though, it has only ever functioned in the pursuit of disaster. This is a building that has always predicted its own destruction.

Rewind. The building was occupied in 1988 and is a maze of spaces and functions that are symbolically and functionally arranged. This building which looks like a Central European castle, with a Norman keep that at a distance could be the original fortifications of the early city, that has its own series of turrets and towers, that in ceremonial place of a drawbridge has fire doors from which the heroic fire-fighters, defenders of the city, would come in all their red flashing regalia, to rescue maidens in burning towers from fire breathing dragons, has another purpose: beneath it lies Sheffield’s only nuclear bunker.

Fortifications are built with their own destruction in mind. They are only useful to that point. When designed, they bear in mind the means of attack and the imagined escalating scenarios of what might happen. The fire station has its brick battlements, fortifications at street level, its exterior structure enclosing an interior courtyard. These defences reference what it is protecting: the city, civilisation, the civic institution.

Under the fire station is a block designed solely for catastrophe. Constructed as the command centre in the case of nuclear war, this is a massive concrete, climate controlled war room from which the remains of the city could be overseen. (If you have ever seen Threads, the chills should be running up your spine.) That this was built in the late 1980s is a memorial to the fact that the period was conscious of a powerful threat, however questionable its basis in fact. It’s a frankly terrifying idea to imagine that you are constructing the building that will be the only one remaining. It comes down to the thought that above all, form follows fiction.

Regeneration follows a similar disaster narrative. Development is essentially founded on a fictitious problem. At its heart is a conceit that is soon to become realised; that the city is a blank canvas. The current fate of the city centre is defined by a master-plan that involves the large scale demolition of a series of buildings, mostly constructed in the last 40 years. In its place will be a shopping district that will be privately owned, operated and secured; itself a whole other issue Sheffield so far has yet to face. The economic drive that renders parts of the city more or less ‘valuable’ has appeared now as regeneration.

How quickly can we imagine the removal of the fabric and constructed scenes that surround us? We do it far more quickly in reality. Having only built a nuclear shelter at the end of the cold war, we now plan to build a shopping centre at what many predict to be the demise of the economy. So before it is destroyed perhaps a wager: what more likely? Nuclear war or Sevenstone?

In the end, the fear that drove this building, and the helplessness of its current situation, are two similar forms of paranoia. Both are beyond our control, and drive extreme constructions. It’s not change that we should fear; perhaps it’s best that the fire station is levelled and replaced. But it’s a cautionary tale - it’s fear and fiction that we should be wary of.