Nowt short of genius

The opening of two stunning new galleries proves ambitious design is alive and well and living in Yorkshire, says Hugh Pearman

South Yorkshire has got itself a bit of a reputation as the railway siding of ambitious lottery-funded cultural projects. Two have found themselves shunted into the rusting goods yard of visitor indifference: the eco-park of the Earth Centre, outside Doncaster, and the National Centre for Popular Music in Sheffield. Now two more are thundering down the track. Just arrived are the £15m Millennium Galleries in Sheffield, followed by the opening, this Thursday, of the £37m Magna "science adventure centre" in next-door Rotherham. Will people get on board?

Having been round both, I can report that Yorkshire folk will be missing a double treat if they shun these latest attractions. One does worry, though: without wishing to suggest that people are in any way parochial around there, I did fall into the hands of a Rotherham taxi driver who had no idea where the centre of Sheffield was. It was a couple of miles away. About the distance, in fact, that separates London's two Tate galleries. Which is an instructive parallel, since - just as in London - one of these new Yorkshire centres is a purpose-designed art gallery, and the other is a titanic converted industrial building.

There the resemblance ends. The Millennium Galleries are designed by a fast-rising firm of architects, Pringle Richards Sharratt, and being conceived as spaces off a pedestrian mall - a kind of cultural shopping arcade - are as different from your received impression of a grandly aloof art museum as you could imagine. Meanwhile, at Magna - a hands-on science centre made out of the former Templeborough steel mill - the architects Wilkinson Eyre have exploited the existing industrial heritage of their building much more than Tate Modern ever did in its converted power station on London's Bankside.

Chris Wilkinson and Jim Eyre are one of the great success stories of British architecture, emerging from nowhere in the 1990s to stand among the leaders in 2001. An ambitious new exhibition of their work, also opening this weekend, occupies a whole floor at London's Science Museum and has a book tie-in: both are called Bridging Art and Science. At Magna, given a budget that was tiny by Tate standards, they realised they could make a huge effect simply by dropping four new buildings - representing the elements of earth, air, fire and water - into the gargantuan spaces of the theatrically lit steel mill, and slinging walkways between them. It works a treat.

While Magna deals with scientific concepts and experiences, jazzed up - it is emphatically not a museum - the galleries deal with precious and rare objects. Magna makes a virtue out of being a rough-and-ready found object; the galleries are newly, smoothly perfect. Magna stands in an industrial area, with working steel mills nearby; the galleries are in a grand civic centre. Magna is complete in itself; the galleries make much of their partnership connections with the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Tate. So it is hard to see much of a joint audience for the two venues, though both look longingly at the very buoyant retail market of the area. Magna is trying hard to tap into the huge consumer pool of the nearby Meadowhall shopping centre, one of Britain's biggest, while the galleries are designed to draw in the passing trade of Sheffield's populous heart.

As a piece of urban design, the Millennium Galleries are exemplary. The building makes links. Its public arcade leads from the centre towards the station. The sequence of four barrel-vaulted galleries opens off this mall. One is the Ruskin Gallery, containing the diverse city-owned collection originally amassed by the writer and critic John Ruskin in 1875, now given a gothicky new display. One is a craft and design gallery - effectively a miniature contemporary design museum. The third is devoted to metalwork - Sheffield's great skill from the 14th century to the present. The final room, for special exhibitions, kicks off with a show called Precious, featuring 250 valuables from the V&A. A bit of a portmanteau show, this - not much connects an ancient Chinese jade horse's head with the pair of Vivienne Westwood platform shoes that Naomi Campbell famously fell over in. Then again, objects from the V&A have a way of looking better outside the forbidding South Kensington storehouse, and this light, accessible gallery will bring in a very different audience.

At the uphill end, the architects will soon start to add an arched "winter garden" botanical glasshouse as part of a more expansive and en-lightened piece of masterplanning, almost Victorian in scope, which makes the effect of the new galleries much bigger than the building itself.

Will Magna and the Millennium Galleries draw the crowds, in the way that the existing archeological attraction of York's Jorvik Viking Centre - which reopened yesterday after a £5m refit - does? The formula is to have a clear identity, so people know what they are buying into. Magna will have to work harder at this than the new Sheffield galleries, because it is a new concept for Britain. Both are fascinating and both deserve to succeed. 

© The Sunday Times 2001