I have found my people living at 21 Nursery Street in the 1851 census. The next entry is for Nursery No. 1 Court and this seems to have three dwellings in it, and one of the inhabitants is a wheelwright employing 2 men, so not the sort of poor court I first imagined. Can anybody tell me about the area at this sort of time, please? Anything at all would be wonderful. Thank you.
Some of my own family lived in that area. It was low lying by the river, not particularly healthy and certainly not wealthy.
The area was affected by the Great Sheffield Flood of 1864 and the claims for compensation give a good idea of the type of people who lived there and what few possessions they had.
You can search the claims archive at https://www2.shu.ac.uk/sfca/search.cfm
If you search on the word nursery in the address field it brings up a lot of hits.
Thank you so much for sharing this information with me. I look forward to looking into it. Almost the whole family was wiped out when they lived here, causes of death ranging from cholera, typhus, and tuberculosis in a decade. It's important to me to find out more about their lives, even though I can't go back and change anything. Hope that makes sense!