Sheffield City Council has confirmed that it can now proceed with its plans to erect a statue commemorating the women who kept the city’s steelworks and factories running during both World Wars, after a £150,000 fund-raising effort.

The campaign was launched in 2012 by the council, which donated £28,000 to the fund and called on local businesses, organisations and individuals to raise the money required to commission a permanent memorial.

The council said that the response had been overwhelming and that support came “not just from local supporters but nationally and internationally.”

Designed by Martin Jennings, who sculpted the statue of John Betjeman at St Pancras station in London, the statue shows two ‘women of steel’ — one in dungarees and a headscarf, the other in a boiler suit and her hair in a cap. Mr Jennings says the statue “celebrates the group of unsung heroes whose tireless work in unfamiliar surroundings of the factory floors went largely unheralded for 70 years.

“The women were conscripted to help produce armaments in the factories when the men went off to fight, earning half of the male workers’ wages.”

The statue is due to be unveiled in Barker’s Pool square in the city in the summer of 2016.