The site has been holy ground for longer than the city it now serves. The shaft of the 9th-century Sheffield Cross, now in the British Museum, is believed to have stood here before any church was built. A parish church was almost certainly raised in the 12th century by William de Lovetot, the Norman lord of Hallamshire, at the opposite end of his small town to Sheffield Castle. The church burned in 1266 during the Second Barons' War against Henry III. A replacement was finished in 1280, then mostly demolished and rebuilt around 1430 in a cruciform plan that still defines the building's heart. The Shrewsbury Chapel was added in the 16th century. The vestry chapel - now St Katherine's - in 1777. The nave walls were rebuilt in the 1790s, the transepts added in 1880 by Flockton & Gibbs. When the Diocese of Sheffield was created in 1914, this old parish church was elevated, mostly because nothing grander existed.

Sir Charles Nicholson's original 1900s design called for a radical rotation of the church's axis by 90 degrees - a dramatic re-orientation that would have remade the cathedral entirely. The World Wars came. Funds collapsed. Materials were rationed. Nicholson's vision was scaled back to whatever could be paid for and built between the bombings. The bulk of the changes ended up affecting the northern half of the building, with new chapels and the lantern tower added piece by piece through the 20th century. The result is an awkward plan - the cathedral does not quite fit the shape any architect would have chosen for it - but a magnificent south elevation, and a building that is honestly itself. The main west entrance was added in 1966 when the church was rededicated. The lantern tower's clear panes were replaced in 1998-99 by an abstract design by glass artist Amber Hiscott.

Twice the cathedral has burned. On 17 July 1979, a fire began inside the belfry in the early hours of the morning, spreading down to the ground floor and up to the clockroom. At least 35 firefighters from Division Street station fought to save the spire, narrowly winning. The 1970 bells survived. The Ringing Room did not - and with it burned every record of the cathedral's bellringers stretching back six hundred years. Two anonymous phone calls to the Sheffield Star the previous evening had warned of the attack. The cause was confirmed as arson; no perpetrator was ever found. On 14 May 2020, in the middle of the COVID pandemic, a second fire broke out, this time in the section used by the Cathedral Archer Project - a homelessness charity that, before the fire, had been serving around 180 free meals a day. A 40-year-old woman was arrested and charged with arson. Donations poured in. The Archer Project was working again, from temporary premises, within weeks.

The east end is the oldest, with stones from the 13th-century church still visible in the sanctuary wall. The 15th-century cruciform church once had lofts and a rood chapel - Elizabeth I ordered them removed in the 1560s as part of the Protestant settlement, and you can still see the scars on the walls where they were torn out. During restoration work in 2013, the cathedral discovered something stranger: many of the Shrewsbury family coffins were missing from the crypt, despite generations of tombs ostensibly resting there. The chancel roof's gilded angels still look down. The Sheffield Supertram now stops at Cathedral, opened in 1995 and served by all four lines - bringing each day a flow of commuters, shoppers and visitors past a parish church that was Norman, then medieval, then Victorian, then a cathedral, and is still, somehow, a parish church too.