How steel city became well heeled

The National Lottery has produced a considerable number of new galleries and museums across the country but it would be foolish to maintain that every project funded by the unintentional largesse of the Lottery‑playing masses has been worthwhile.

Next to several huge successes. such as the Eden Project or Tate Modern, you have to place a few new institutions of embarrassing thinness, where the public demand has proved, at best, limited.

The new art gallery in Walsall is popular, and is a very attractive building, but Lottery funding alone could not improve the very undistinguished quality of the collection, and it is hard to believe that people will carry on going just for the sake of the architecture.

South Yorkshire, with its Lottery flops such as the Earth Centre at Doncaster and the Centre for Popular Music in Sheffield (another spectacular building), has been unkindly described as a 'Bermuda' triangle' as far as the Lottery commissioners are concerned.

So it is a pleasure to report that the newest addition to the region, the Millennium Galleries in Sheffield is so solid, attractive and substantial. It needs, for once, no excuses.

The building was designed by Pringle Richards Sharratt and they have come up with a handsome, tactful statement. The square, simple and airy galleries may, as the Northern joke goes, be ‘more glass than wall' but that was said long ago about one of the local palaces, Hardwick Hall, and it is odd how well a great‑windowed edifice sits under rapidly shifting Yorkshire skies.

And, to my slight relief, the contents justify the project.

Sheffield has a particular heritage, and the pleasing thing is that one feels the museum could not be anywhere else.

John Ruskin was closely involved with the city and, in his idealist way, provided it with examples of the highest culture in the hope that steelworkers could, on a Sunday afternoon, find elevation in Renaissance art. (Well, it worked for me, as they say; 1 grew up in Sheffield and first grew to love painting in weekly visits to the fascinating collections of the city's galleries.) The new gallery devotes a crowded, absorbing room to Ruskin.

Sheffield is built, of course. on metal foundries, and the second, specific element here is an exploration of the often splendid metalwork created over the centuries.

The examples are frequently magnificent from exuberant rococo through to the excesses of the Eighties via the lovely lines of Grecian classicism of around 1800 and the austere, self-conscious modernism of early Art Deco which one feels are the styles which best suit the medium, and the determined, practical spirit of metalworkers.

The gallery is going to provide a home, too, for temporary exhibitions. It opens with a display of new Austrian jewellery, which, out of the kindness of my, heart, I am going to pass over, and a very miscellaneous show borrowed from the Victoria & Albert Museum

The theme here is of objects which have been, or are, regarded as precious; on consideration, that might include absolutely anything in the V&A, and the show ranges around wildly, from a divine Mughal miniature to a pair of platform shoes by Vivienne Westwood

All the same, it is full of individually splendid things; a Lucie Rie pot of extraordinary simplicity and refinement makes its mark in any company The jewel box of Mary II represents a moment in the decorative arts in England which hardly anyone knows, and its weighty luxuriant mass of styles exerts a barbaric fascination. The show which includes some of the V & A's most treasured objects, is full of similar discoveries waiting to be made.

There is lots to look forward to, including a Francis Bacon show in a few months. In short, there is every reason to suppose that Sheffield is getting what it deserves, and what ‑ the citizens would remind you - they paid for: a gallery with every chance of success and popularity.

© Mail on Sunday 2001