The Sheffield Winter Garden is the second phase of the £120m Heart of the City regeneration project, following the £15m Sheffield Millennium Galleries. It is one of the largest temperate glasshouses to be built in the UK during the last hundred years, and the largest urban glasshouse anywhere in Europe. Housing more than 2,000 plants from all around the world, the garden was the most generous part of the scheme, rises from either end through glazed elliptical timber arches, and through its center the galleries appear to ripple towards the street.

The palette of materials and spatial articulation recalls the public buildings of Hopkins & Partners where both Pringle and Sharratt worked extensively, experience which allowed them to tackle such a project with ease. The measures are approximately some 70 m long and 21 m high. The building was conceived as a covered galleria an integral part of the network of pedestrian streets which together with the Millennium Galleries forms a pedestrian hub linking the Civic, Arts and University quarters of Sheffield, a cultural route through to the city center.

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Sheffield Millennium Galleries is a pair of inspirational, landmark buildings by Pringle Richards Sharratt Architects who won the commission in competition in 1995. The Millennium Galleries is an art gallery in the City of Sheffield, England, finished in 2001, then the Sheffield Winter Garden in 2002. They were conceived as the most important parts of the Heart of the City Project and located in the city center close to the city library, Sheffield Hallam University, and the city’s theater district, also covered links in a new pedestrian route between the station and city center, helping restore part of the urban fabric that had been unravelled by post-war road schemes and redevelopment.

The Sheffield Millennium Galleries was won through a competition based on the first of a series of masterplans for this massive central area of Sheffield. Consequently, part of the context with which the galleries were designed to work was missing at the time of completion, but the architects were determined to create a fragment of a dense urban fabric rather than a building as an object. The success of such a drastic transformation of this part of the city center was immediate, with the galleries becoming a popular destination for local people.

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