Christopher Hallam

Christopher Hallam writes for The Star with a focus on food and the wider cultural life surrounding it, using local history, interviews and nostalgia-led features to show how venues, artists and everyday residents shape Sheffield over time. His work blends coverage of long-standing food institutions with music, books and community heritage, giving readers a sense of place rather than just individual products or events. He works on the editorial side of the newsroom and previously worked in the games industry, bringing a storyteller’s eye and a familiarity with audience-driven media to his reporting.

Food heritage and long-standing institutions

Hallam’s food coverage centres on legacy businesses and their role in the city’s identity, rather than on short-term trends or reviews. In his photo-led feature on Joe’s Ice Cream, he traces the brand’s evolution over a hundred years, using archival images and present-day shots to show how a single dessert business becomes part of local memory and family routines. He treats food venues as community anchors, placing them in a historical frame and drawing out the continuity between past and present.

Across his food writing, formats such as multi-image galleries and retrospective features allow him to combine visual detail with concise context, favouring clear captioning and straightforward narrative over criticism or lifestyle-driven language. The emphasis is on how places endure, who visits them, and the stories attached to them, which gives his food pieces a heritage angle that is distinct from a reporter focused on openings, menus or chef profiles.

Music interviews and live performance coverage

Music interviews are a major strand of Hallam’s work, and he develops them through the “Chris Talks Music” banner, both in print and in audio. In his interview with Fun Lovin’ Criminals ahead of their show at the O2 Academy2, he uses the upcoming performance as a hook but spends most of the piece on conversation about their music, influences and relationship with the city. His feature with Reverend and the Makers around the album “Heatwave In The Cold North” similarly focuses on creative process and personal grounding, going beyond standard tour promotion to explore how the band stays rooted while releasing new work.

These music articles are structured as accessible Q&As or narrative interviews, foregrounding direct quotes and letting artists speak at length about themes such as staying grounded, evolving sound and audience connection. Hallam’s tone is informal but precise, with questions that invite reflection rather than hype, which positions his music coverage as artist-focused storytelling rather than pure listings or gig round-ups. The continuity between his print interviews and his “Chris Talks Music” podcast gives his subjects multiple formats in which their voices are heard.

Books, authors and crime fiction

Hallam also writes about authors and new books, often through interviews that frame creative work in relation to place. In his piece on a crime novel set in Deepcar, he leads with the author’s insistence that the book is “not an Agatha Christie murder mystery,” using that line to signal a departure from familiar tropes and to prompt discussion of tone and structure. The focus is on why the writer chose that setting, how local detail informs the story, and what makes the book distinct within crime fiction.

His approach to book coverage mirrors his music interviews: direct quotations, clear explanation of themes and avoidance of jargon. Rather than reviewing in a formal critical style, he presents authors as people in conversation with their surroundings, which aligns his literary pieces with The Star’s broader culture and features output. This emphasis on place and creative process makes his book coverage relevant for stories that intersect with local settings, genre experimentation or author-led promotion.

Community history and local voices

Hallam’s features in The Star’s retro and community sections show a strong interest in everyday history and how residents remember local services, events and figures. In his article on calls for the return of Scout Post, he focuses on one resident’s question, “Why can't it be done again?”, using it to examine delays in letter delivery and nostalgia for a community-run postal system. The piece treats postal logistics not just as an operational issue but as part of civic life, reflecting how small-scale initiatives can leave lasting impressions.

His story about William Plommer, described as a murdered man who became a folk hero whose impact is still felt a century later, places an individual’s fate within the long arc of city history. Hallam reconstructs the narrative around Plommer to explain why the figure remains significant, tying personal tragedy to collective memory and ongoing local references. These retro articles rely on clear timelines, strong headline framing and an emphasis on the human dimension of historical events, which differentiates his work from more transactional news coverage.

Across these community and history pieces, Hallam consistently brings in direct voices—quoted residents, authors, musicians or historical figures drawn from records—and uses them to structure the article. That pattern, combined with the “fresh perspective for online news” descriptor on his author page, underlines a through-line: he reports on food, music, books and local history in ways that highlight how people themselves narrate the changing city. For stories rooted in heritage businesses, cultural events, creative work or civic memory, his beat and style make him a natural fit.