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, while the galleries make much of their partnership connections with the Victoria and Albert Museum and, yes, 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 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. Who knows - some of them might even be tempted to make the trip down to London to find the mother lode.
The obligatory cafe is tucked into the hillside beneath the galleries. Outside, a ring road has been partly narrowed and civilised. At the uphill end, the architects will soon start to add an arched "winter garden" botanical glasshouse - gothic in the way that the Sydney Opera House is gothic, which means overlapping pointed forms. Doing this entails demolishing a 1960s town hall extension behind, which in turn allows a new link through to the public gardens of the city centre. It's an enlightened 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 archaeological attraction of York's Jorvik Viking Centre - long established, and which reopened yesterday (April 7) after a £5m refit, succeeds? The formula is to have a clear identity, so that 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. Go there, why don't you?
http://www.magnatrust.org.uk
http://www.sheffieldgalleries.org.uk
