Yorkshire Forward, the development group who own the centre, issued a press release to confirm they have accepted a £1.85m offer from the university, who plan to use the building as the base for their new Student’s Union.
Professor Diana Green, Vice Chancellor of Sheffield Hallam University said: “We’re now keen to move as quickly as we can. We are already picking up a buzz of excitement around our plan, which we believe will make a significant contribution to the spirit of the Cultural Industries Quarter and the life of the city.”
As previously reported on DiS, pressure group Pride in Sheffield had been campaigning for several months in an attempt to prevent the building being sold, and instead ensure “a positive and sustainable future for the National Centre for Popular Music as a public centre for cultural and creative activities. “
The NCPM closed as a visitor attraction in August 2000 after just 16 months. It cost £15m, with £11m in lottery grants. The centre was expected to attract 400,000 people a year, but drew fewer than a quarter of that.
NCPM: R.I.P.
Plus it would inevitably suffer from the provincialism of people in this country - we'll moan about travelling any distance whilst forgetting that it's a helluva lot worse in other countries. In the latest set of Q&As on Mogwai's website, someone complains about them not playing Birmingham, and Stuart quite rightly points out that they've got a gig in Northampton, 'only' 55 miles away - people in the States (esp the Midwest) have to travel for days rather than hours to see some bands.
Not that I'm qualified to talk; I'm a southern softy who gets nosebleeds if I get any further than Watford...
Re: NCPM: R.I.P.
Anybody who visited the NCPM in its original incarnation as an ‘interactive pop place’ (Was it supposed to be a museum? A hall of fame? An exhibition centre? A community resource? It defied description from the outset…) will have been as astonished as I was to discover that there was simply nothing inside the building to ‘entertain’ visitors for more than half an hour at the very most. It was a total vacuum, consisting of little more than a few half-baked ideas for each themed ‘drum’, most of which were out of order within weeks of it opening, or just plain unexciting.
If it really did cost £15m, it’s clear that almost all of the budget must have been spent on the building itself (which is magnificent), because it felt as if no thought had been given to what was actually going to be put inside it.
When it closed its doors, we were told it would be re-thought, refurbished, and re-opened within months, but that never happened. Barfly used one of the drums as a venue for a few months, which at least brought people into the building, but when Barfly got their marching orders, it always looked as though the NCPM was going to be privately sold.
What really gets me is that this is a (indirectly) publicly-funded centre, which could have become the centre-piece for Sheffield’s musical and cultural community, but instead it’s been flogged to a university, which means most of us won’t be able to use it. The whole thing has been an almighty cock-up from start to finish, and one which, it pains me to say, could only happen in Sheffield.
Re: NCPM: R.I.P.
In any case, the idea that a publicly-funded, government-controlled enterprise could ever capture the essence of rock and pop music - perhaps the most inherently capitalistic and anti-authoritarian artform ever created - is rather silly to begin with...
Re: NCPM: R.I.P.
Re: NCPM: R.I.P.