The origins, evolution and failure of the cultural vision for the Sheffield Media and Exhibition Centre

The Sheffield Media and Exhibition Centre – the Media Centre, as it was known to stakeholders and the press for nearly seven years between 1988 and 1995 – was the flagship of Sheffield City Council’s ambitious plans for urban regeneration in the city in the 1990s. Eventually named the Showroom Cinema and Workstation – the latter a complex of offices and conference spaces for local media and creative businesses – the Media Centre was intended to serve as a cultural, economic and social hub in the south-east of Sheffield’s city centre, an area that had become increasingly derelict and devoid of cultural and social life since the rapid decline of the city’s once strong steel industry in the 1980s. Architecturally the Media Centre was meant to signal to regional, national and even international media and communications industries that Sheffield was a renewed city, looking to the future – ‘themes of the century’, as it was deemed by the Council’s Department for Employment and Economic Development (DEED).1 Economically it was meant to rejuvenate Sheffield’s urban core and bring about the development of a creative economy. But more importantly for the cultural stakeholders involved in the project – the board members of Sheffield Media and Exhibition Centre Ltd (SMEC), the private charity overseeing the development – it was meant to serve as a radical transformative site that would unleash the creative potential of the people of Sheffield. Far from being merely a corporate, urban redevelopment scheme, or even just a cinema, SMEC’s cultural stakeholders wanted the Media Centre to become a utopian space for education, production and distribution that could challenge mainstream media industries. They were attempting to reimagine the architectural space of cinema as an urban space capable of transformative societal change, in which the Media Centre would be a place for all the people of Sheffield. Indeed the Media Centre was positioned by board members as the public focus of the wider Cultural Industries Quarter (CIQ) urban development scheme in which it was located. The CIQ was a designated zone in the south-east of the city centre in which former cutlery workshops and warehouses were being converted into gallery spaces, offices and art exhibition sites.