Chapter 1 explores the development of Sheffield, the ’Steel City’, and its steel-making, cutlery and flatware and coal-mining industries. Its character as a town and surrounding conurbation whose culture was dominated by the working classes rather than by the middle classes or industrialists is also examined. Sheffield, a town formerly renowned as the world’s foremost centre of steel production, had notoriety as a hotbed of working-class radicalism. This is discussed, as are its cultural insularity (largely through geography) and relative isolation from other major economic centres. The chapter discusses the crucial role of immigration in Sheffield’s remarkable rate of population growth during the nineteenth century. It provides context for an emerging non-white immigration within a period of rapid demographic change. Immigration – first from the rural hinterland, then from further afield and abroad – was particularly apparent in the growth of Sheffield’s East End steelworking district. The chapter’s aim is to provide a social, economic and cultural context for close analysis of the arrival and successful settlement of non-elite South Asians from the later years of the First World War until Indian Partition in 1947, the British Nationality Act of 1948 and the Windrush era of mass non-white immigration.