Potteries Museum and Art Gallery

Fittingly situated in the Potteries, this museum was being born as the industries that brought about its existence faded. Stylistically, it is something of a brutalist-PoMo hybrid. It has the forceful massing of mid-century municipal architecture, a top floor slab that overhangs the floor below, but also enough in the way of curves, colour and expression that positions it materially on the cusp of the 1970s and ‘80s. A curiously mixed palette of buff bricks, brown bricks, red GRP feature windows, tiles (appropriately) and concrete panels afford little coherence to the whole, but are pleasingly detailed as elements themselves. As the building sits on a sloping site, the entrance is via a bridge at the upper-ground level, giving the scheme a slight defensive quality. This is latter day local authority architecture at its idiosyncratic best.