They are formed as 11 bays on a 7.5 x 15m grid, with a series of rooms covered in exposed precast concrete vaults - the finely finished concrete of the vaults, beams and posts creates the internal character of the building. The main gallery level is, however, an unusually satisfying, unfussy and truly modern succession of top-lit spaces, 1,500m 2inarea, of which John Ruskin, with his loathing of pretension and empty display, might have approved. None of the undercroft spaces are more than functional, though the education rooms benefit from the availability of natural light. The undercroft contains education spaces, stores, staff accommodation and plant and is serviced via an underground road created as part of the 1970s town hall extension project. The visitor - maybe an outsider, like me, having toiled up the hill from the station - entering from the eastern end, on Arundel Gate (now much tamed and not the impassable barrier it was), passes the restaurant, which opens out onto a new paved and planted square, and ascends by escalator or lift to the gallery level, exiting on grade at the western end or though a side door into Surrey Street. The galleries take advantage of Sheffield’s steep slopes. Where the planners and architects of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s went out of their way to ignore the regular grid of Georgian Sheffield - a surprising amount of which survives - PRS reconnects with the historic pattern. ‘This is also a covered, enclosed space, ’ he says, ‘but it is true public space, where there is calm and, we hope, beauty.’ He compares the complex to the networks of alleys and covered ways found in Mediterranean cities. John Pringle makes a comparison with the enclosed malls of Meadowhall, the outof-town shopping centre which spelt near-ruin for central Sheffield. The Millennium Galleries, say the architects, is not a freestanding object but ‘a series of streets and spaces ‘mined’ out of a dense bit of urban fabric’. The urban strategy behind PRS’ galleries and Winter Gardens project is essentially anti-Modernist - at least in the old Modern Movement, Pevsner/Womersley understanding of the term. ) The inner ring road constructed around the centre under the regime of J L Womersley (city architect 1953-63) is rightly regarded as an unmitigated disaster. (As a retail centre, Sheffield lags way behind Manchester, Leeds and Nottingham. The achievements of the 1950s and ’60s are now widely seen as a burden, with the drab commercial buildings of the period - Sheffield had suffered severe wartime bombing - no match for their Victorian predecessors and undoubtedly responsible in part for the city’s commercial decline. In June 2000, Koetter Kim was appointed as masterplanner for the central area - where 50 per cent of Sheffield’s jobs are based. Last year, Sheffield One, one of three new government-backed urban regeneration companies, was launched with the prime purpose of regenerating not Sheffield’s rundown industrial fringes, devastated by the contraction of the steel industry, but the city centre, which Pevsner and Nairn had so admired. ‘Sheffield could be the boom town of the 1960s.’ ‘The buildings put up in the last 10 years and projected for the next 20 are as interesting and exciting as all the older buildings in the city put together, ’ he wrote in 1961. No other English city except London can show so impressive an architectural record.’ Ian Nairn was equally fulsome. Pevsner wrote of the ‘massive achievement of Sheffield from about 1950 onwards. Forty years ago, Sheffield was seen as a city with a bright future, its prospects buoyed by its innovative approach to architecture and planning.
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