Michael Glover – a celebrated arts critic for The Times and The Economist who was educated at Firth Park School – has added the back garden of 12 Hardwick Crescent, Brincliffe, to his book tour that has already entertained packed venues in Venice and London.

"I've not performed in Sheffield for five years and was looking for a venue with a difference. I love the leafy suburbs of the city so I thought why not perform at the heart of them?" he explained.

The venue is the home of his nephew Richard Anderson, a PR man/journalist.

The 1987 Nobel Prize-winner in Literature Joseph Brodsky was a big fan of Michael Glover's work. He said: "I find these poems enviably idosyncratic and, for that reason, attractive… they don't fish for applause and don't explain themselves."

The event takes place at 8pm and is open to all-comers on a first come, first served basis. Entrance is free but places must be booked in advance via sanmarco@andersonwest.com

Michael Glover, who is married and lives in London, is promoting his new book The Sheer Hell of Living, which is published by San Marco Press.

45 Coningsby Road, Firvale

Perhaps a child's favourite place is often his own backyard. Mine was at 45 Coningsby Road, a Victorian terrace street in Fir Vale. Half of the street is still standing. My half was demolished in the 1980s, in preparation for a crack-brained scheme to widen Herries Road that never happened.

Four small houses shared that same backyard. You opened the back door on to a bare asphalt yard.

In the far corner there was a tiny splash of nature – a rockery, often parched, overlooked by a laburnum tree which shed hundreds of tiny yellow petals; a green wooden shed where my grandfather's BSA, the push bikes and my albino mice were kept (their eyes shone red – just like traffic lights – by evening torchlight); dustbins for climbing on if you wanted to get over the wall to my friend Enid's house faster than usual; outside lavvies – the wind didn't half whip under the door as you squatted on the seat, with freezing knees, trying to read bits of torn up copies of the Radio Times; and, at the top end of the yard, an old red-brick air raid shelter, part above ground, part below.

We used to go to this dank, dark, bone-chilling place, with its huge, almost unbudgeable iron door, to frighten each other to death with ghost stories.

The Sunbeam in Firvale

Walking around Sheffield in the 1950s you always saw so many decaying cinemas and so many decaying Methodist chapels, too. It was as if God and the film industry had given up the ghost at exactly the same moment.

One cinema which survived into my teenage years was The Sunbeam in Fir Vale, which was no more than a couple of hundred yards from our house.

A grand survivor from the pre-war years, this was one of those huge cinema palaces that would have been full to the ginnels in the 1940s and whose shabby, red plush seats always seemed – sadly – nine-tenths empty by the time I used to visit.

Nevertheless, this was the place I used to go to with my older sister Pat for the Saturday morning children's matinee. We saw Captain Marvel, The Three Stooges, Bugs Bunny and all those other cinematic wonders.

I still remember standing watching the wrecker's ball taking swing after swing at its walls and many years later I even wrote a poem about its demolition, spoken as if by a Sheffield child.

Wincobank Hill

Walk along the Bottom – as the row of shops in Fir Vale used to be called – and you soon came to Owler Lane, which threaded you gently downhill towards Attercliffe and the east end of town. Soon enough you'd catch sight of a hill rising up – Wincobank Hill, my second favourite spot, which you reached through a maze of long, terrace streets. It was steep, high and quite tawny/scrubby – no lush grass up there, though there were quite a few small, tough-looking oak trees growing, if not prospering, against all the odds.

There was a Second World War gun emplacement not far from the top, circular, made of shiny red brick, with steps up to where the anti-aircraft guns would have been. I used to stand in the middle and swivel on my heel, like the guns would have done, and blast the sky with clenched fists, elbows pressed tight to my sides.

But most of all I used to stare east, down into the Don Valley, completely fascinated and horrified, too, by what I could see. It was like some vision of Hell dreamt by the poet William Blake – long black rolling mills; black smoke coughing and belching into the sky from black chimneys; dramatic spurts of yellow flame from others. This was the steel industry, in full blast, and soon to disappear as if it had never been.

Violet May's Record Shop and Rare 'N' Racy

Many of my favourite places have gone. Violet May's Record Shop where, in a grim and rather grimy, smoke-filled shop – Violet was quite a smoker – I picked over rare American blues and jazz records, the likes of which I had never seen before. Blind Willie Johnson. Blind Lemon Jefferson.

One great survivor is Rare 'N' Racy on Devonshire Street, which also sold – and still sells – a marvellous combination of records and second hand books.

The Mulberry Tavern

The Mulberry Tavern was my favourite pub, in a little side street behind Saxone's shoe shop (also long gone) in the city centre.