Arts & Civic

Sheffield Millennium Gallery

Sheffield, South Yorkshire

“A pair of inspirational, landmark buildings by Pringle Richards Sharratt who won the commission in competition in 1995. The Galleries were completed in 2001, the Garden in 2002. They were conceived as the most important elements of the Heart of the City Project and as covered links in a new pedestrian route between the station and city centre, helping restore part of the urban fabric that had been unravelled by post-war road schemes and redevelopment. 

The Millennium Galleries provide 1,900 m2 of temporary exhibition space as well as permanent displays of the Ruskin Collection and the city’s fine metalwork and silverware collections. The building eschews ostentation, presenting an elegant and quietly understated front to Arundel Gate, and is set into the slope of the hill with the galleries on the upper level over a service undercroft. The glazed front is set within a slender modular frame of white concrete and reveals the ground floor café to the bustle of Arundel Gate. Long silver louvres screen the Long Gallery above. Inside, a light and spacious entrance hall has escalators to the first floor “avenue᾿ which serves both as an indoor street to the Winter Garden and gives access to the five galleries on its left side.”
[Pevsner Architectural Guide to Sheffield]