Who owns the pop museum?

The headlines almost wrote themselves. “Top of the flops” and “Rock Horror Show” were two of the earliest and best. After all the easy puns were exhausted, journalists had to get more creative. “Pop museum faces crisis as visitors walk on by,” wrote the Sunday Times after projected visitor numbers failed to materialise, while the Guardian rolled out “Pop museum must change its tune” after an emergency rescue package demanded a different approach. 

Opened to great fanfare on 1 March 1999, the National Centre for Popular Music (NCPM) was meant to become Sheffield’s major tourist attraction, but ended up being the city’s original balls up. Think the Fargate Container Park debacle but multiplied by a factor of fifty. Almost £15 million of public money (the equivalent of around £28 million today) was sunk into a venue which only stayed open for 17 months. 

After a few years of trying to turn it into a live music venue, in 2002, the regional development agency Yorkshire Forward bought it for £1.8 million. This constituted about one tenth of what it originally cost. A year later it was sold for an undisclosed sum to Sheffield Hallam University to become their students’ union, which it remains today. Writing in the Guardian in 2002, Martin Wainwright said the “lottery white elephant is set to end its forlorn career by becoming the most expensive student union in the country.” 

Anyone over a certain age in Sheffield at the time will remember the period well. The high hopes followed by crushing disappointment; the embarrassment and reputational damage caused by something that was meant to signify the “new Sheffield” becoming a national laughing stock. Why rake it all up again after a quarter of a century? Earlier this year, Sheffield Hallam University was reported to be considering moving its students’ union from the former NCPM to a new building on Howard Street. At the time Hallam said they were “looking at several different options for the building as part of the next phase of our Campus Plan.” When asked if demolition was a possibility, they pointedly didn’t rule it out.

Over the years, the memories of some of those involved have blurred, while others have probably tried to forget. But many remain proud of what they were trying to achieve, even if it did ultimately fail. Matthew Conduit, who sat on its board and later took on a more hands-on management role, describes the NCPM as “the one that got away” among a series of cultural projects that are still successful to this day, from The Leadmill to the Showroom Cinema, and Site Gallery to Persistence Works. But if Hallam does leave, he’s adamant that it shouldn't just be the university who decides what happens to it. “The building was meant to be a cultural asset for the whole of the city,” he says. “Knocking it down would be abhorrent.”

The roots of the NCPM can be traced back to the mid-1980s. Faced with catastrophic industrial decline and a Conservative government indifferent to mass unemployment, Sheffield City Council resolved to do things for itself. The Department for Employment and Economic Development (DEED) was created to provide the city with a vision of a future beyond steel. 

Their response was a new Cultural Industries Quarter (CIQ) in an area south east of the city centre. The Leadmill already existed (in its original, more radical incarnation), while Red Tape Studios, Untitled Gallery (now Site Gallery) and the Showroom Cinema (which grew out of The Anvil municipal cinema) would all follow in either the late 80s or early 90s. A new anchor institution focused on the history of popular music would be its crowning glory.

As chair of DEED, former Sheffield Hillsborough MP Helen Jackson had a key role in many of the decisions made at that time. She details their thinking in the council at length in her 2021 book People’s Republic of South Yorkshire, but it could really be summed up in just three — resistance to Thatcher. “The notion of having a cultural area that gave hope to people who otherwise would have not had a career was a visionary idea really,” says Jackson. “I’m quite proud of what we did in those early days.” Sheffield’s global musical footprint had grown throughout the 80s with bands like The Human League, Def Leppard and ABC achieving massive success in the US. By the late 80s, the idea of a museum devoted to popular music in Sheffield didn’t seem so far-fetched. 

The idea was first mooted in 1987, but it wasn’t until the 90s that work started in earnest. By 1996, a company registered to develop the project won almost £13 million in grant funding from the National Lottery and the European Regional Development Fund. Branson Coates Architects conceived the building as four huge stainless steel drums joined by a ground level web of covered corridors. The revolutionary design was certainly striking, and won approval in the architectural press. But the building wasn’t popular with everyone. One national newspaper critic compared the drums to “lavatory hand‐dryers” and it was later voted the “world's ugliest building” in a 2011 poll. But what was inside didn’t fare much better either. Just days after it opened, the Independent on Sunday criticised the NCPM as “scandalously ill‐conceived … [valuing] presentation more than content”, while the Sunday Times described the centre as “an utter failure in terms of form, content and artistic aspiration”.

Former councillor and Lib Dem council leader from 1999 to 2002 Peter Moore remembers attending the glitzy grand opening. Champagne flowed and canapes were handed out while a still youthful Prime Minister Tony Blair, less than two years into the job, appeared on a giant screen to congratulate Sheffield and wish the centre success. But even on opening night, doubts were already there. “It was obvious the exhibits were pretty rubbish,” says Moore. 

The exhibits were a disparate collection of items related to rock and pop music — think the gold lamé suit owned by Martin Fry of Sheffield synth-pop band ABC, and one of The Clash's Mick Jones' guitars. Interesting enough for fans but not really the kind of thing that was going to encourage return visits. “I don’t know what the people who dreamt it up expected but I saw a lot of glum faces around the place,” says Moore. The then council leader Jan Wilson looked “pretty rueful”, he remembers. “Everyone was thinking, is this it?,” he says. “There was nothing to see.”

Peter’s wife Sylvia Anginotti, herself a former Lib Dem councillor and later cabinet member, agrees. “It was a big let down,” she says,“You certainly wouldn’t go twice.” She remembers a long black wall covered in pinpricks of lights. The idea was people should put their eyes to the holes where they could see…Cilla Black, or Cliff Richard. “It was just crap,” she adds. At around £8 per visit and no discount for children, it couldn’t even sell itself on being value for money.

Another early visitor was Helen Matthews. She went with her husband not long after it first opened but left unimpressed after about an hour. “We tried really hard,” she says. “Everyone wanted it to be good — but it just looked like someone had a lot of money to spend and didn't know what to do with it.” Each of the four drums had a different theme. “Soundscapes” was a 3D surround sound auditorium while “Perspectives” explored different influences on music from dancing, religion, love and rebellion. “Making Music” provided hands-on creative experiences and the final drum was supposed to accommodate changing exhibitions, although this never happened as the museum closed. “One just had a few guitars that had been owned by famous people,” remembers Helen Matthews. She also recalls the holes in the walls with lights in them. “You had to get really close but when you did there were pictures of album covers in them,” she says. “I can't remember whether it played music as well.”

In another room there was a large red velvet sofa in the shape of some lips that whispered sweet nothings in your ear when you sat on it. “It had nothing to do with music,” she says. Helen says she never went back while it was the NCPM and wasn't at all surprised when it closed just a year later. However, after it turned into the students’ union, the downstairs bar was “really good and very popular”, she adds. This bar has never reopened since Covid.

The idea for the NCPM had originally come from the success of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio. When it became obvious that the NCPM was failing to emulate its American cousin, the council’s then chief executive Bob Kerslake even went to Ohio to see if he could learn something from its success. But by that stage it was probably too late. 

Moore thinks one of the major problems was that it was just in the wrong place. The council were offered a space in the Lower Don Valley, but insisted that the NCPM be part of the Cultural Industries Quarter (this tug of war mirrors the long-standing conflict between Meadowhall and the city centre, and the more recent battles over the location of the station intended to welcome HS2). 

The calculation for the numbers of visitors the centre was expecting was based on the size of the population within a two‐hour drive. While the NCPM was near the railway and bus stations, finding enough parking in that part of the city centre was always going to be a problem. This, combined with the paucity of the artefacts on show, meant that the centre was always fighting a losing battle. “I don’t understand what led people to think that it was going to bring in hundreds of thousands of people,” says Moore.

Initial estimates suggesting 800,000 people would visit the centre per year were considered totally unrealistic and were later cut to 400,000. Ultimately, the board based their final plans on a more modest 200,000-250,000, but in the end just 104,000 people came through the doors in its first, presumably busiest, six months. Helen Jackson agrees that the predictions for how many people would come were “way off” and it was “pretty obvious” from an early stage that things weren’t going according to plan. “It just never took off,” she adds.

Matthew Conduit was on the board of the NCPM from near the beginning. At the time he was working at the Showroom Workstation over the road but as the debts racked up he became more hands on in trying to plan a future for the troubled project. He says you can debate forever why it failed, but one reason was definitely a lack of enough interesting exhibits. 

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame had signed agreements with stars like Yoko Ono to provide artefacts, but the NCPM failed to have any similar backing from celebrities or the wider music industry. At the time, criticism was levelled at the NCPM for spending too much money on the building and not enough on its contents (only £1.5 million out of £15 million total cost went on artefacts) but this was actually a conscious decision. 

Rather than just looking at memorabilia, the centre was meant to be about experiences. The Making Music exhibition invited visitors to record their own songs with a range of backing instruments, be a radio DJ, design an album cover or edit a music video (although the fact that the music video was Phil Collins led some to suggest the centre was stuck in the 80s rather than looking forward to the 21st century). However, when these activities had been exhausted, there was little else to draw people in. “In Cleveland they had guitars which had been owned by Jimmy Hendrix,” says Conduit. “We just didn’t have enough of that.” In order to bring more money in, he also introduced live music and club nights, something that was strangely lacking from the initial programme.

However, like Helen Jackson, Conduit refuses to accept the entire idea behind the NCPM was a bad one. He says the centre was just one part of a big discussion over many years about how the city could support creative industries in a post-steel industry Sheffield. “The centre was very disappointing but lots of the other things that came out of the CIQ were really successful and have become an international model,” he argues.

As to what should happen to the building, he too has heard rumours that Hallam might be leaving, and that it might be knocked down. He thinks this would be a huge mistake. Firstly, he thinks the building has architectural merit, in both its unique design and its environmental features. The “turrets” on the roof, for example, were designed to move to face the wind and provide natural ventilation, but the mechanism hasn’t worked for decades. But he also thinks that the NCPM was originally meant for the city of Sheffield, and that any discussion over what happens to it next shouldn't just be left to Sheffield Hallam to decide. “It was funded by a massive amount of public money as a cultural asset for the city,” he says. “If it’s true they are thinking of demolishing it, there needs to be a conversation about stopping them.”

Everyone I’ve spoken to agrees that even if Hallam does leave, the building should be retained. “Over my dead body,” says Helen Jackson when I tell her demolition hasn't been ruled out. “It’s a reminder of the ambition we had as a city in terms of culture,” she says. “I would hate to see it go.” Helen Matthews says that despite its failure, in the last 25 years it has become an “iconic part of Sheffield’s skyline” while Sylvia Anginotti and Peter Moore say it would be “a shame” if the building was knocked down. “To me, the design fits in well with the city,” says Peter Moore. “The drums and the stainless steel.”

Could the inherent tensions in the centre have been ironed out? Possibly not. Conduit says that even as the project was being developed, many in Sheffield argued that attempting to centre pop music in what was essentially a museum — trying to preserve it in aspic — was a fool’s errand. It’s probably no coincidence that it was over 20 years until someone tried again, although the reception the British Pop Archive in Manchester received when it opened in 2022 suggests that maybe a more successful outcome was possible, or at least that times have changed. 

"It sets its sights on the whole of the UK, seeking to document youth culture, particularly pop culture with a certain seriousness that hasn’t been attempted before," wrote one review of the BPA in The Quietus. Does the success of the British Pop Archive suggest that criticisms that “you can’t have a museum of ‘low culture’ pop” were a bit lazy? (the fact that the BPA is hosted by the University of Manchester’s in its John Rylands Library probably meant that it ended up being significantly cheaper than the NCPM as well).

However, the criticisms of the NCPM only amplified after the centre was opened. According to one Independent on Sunday critic, the entire idea for the centre ran counter to the spirit of pop. Pop music is supposed to be an anti‐establishment, yet here it was institutionalised in a museum. In Sheffield is not Sexy, a seminal essay on the NCPM by Stephen Mallinder (of Cabaret Voltaire fame), he writes that the completed centre felt “thematically closer to a science park that institutionalised rather than aestheticised popular music”.

But I think a reappraisal might be in order. The centre failed, there is no doubt about that. But the idea of which it was part was a huge success. Walk around the Cultural Industries Quarter today and you’ll find one of the most vibrant and interesting parts of Sheffield. The Leadmill and Red Tape Studios are still there, battered and bruised, but still there. And later came Site Gallery, the Showroom Cinema and Workstation, Yorkshire Artspace’s Persistence Works and BBC Radio Sheffield, as well as a host of other artist studios and creative businesses. Forty years after it was set up, it would be difficult to argue the CIQ has been anything other than a huge success.

And if Hallam does leave, and does the decent thing and gives the centre back to the city, we could soon have a whole new building to play with, just like the council of the 80s had to decide what to do with an old flour mill and a former car showroom. Knock it down or reimagine it for the 2020s. What should we do with our pop museum?

Did you visit the National Centre for Popular Music? If so, what did you think of it? And what do you think should be done with the building now? As always, paying members can let us know what they think and join the debate in the comments section.