Brutal and ugly, but inspirational ... Sheffield's iconic cooling towers. Photograph: Simon Webster/Rex
Let's be clear about one thing. Whatever you read in support of planning applications for luxury flats, you cannot decide to build an icon. Iconic status is conferred on a building - or a work of art or even David Beckham - by the people who get meaning out of it. It's not just size, fame or even symbolism. Art is not managed into existence.
When the Tinsley viaduct (carrying the M1 over the Don Valley) was first built, you could smell where you were, even when smoke and mist stopped you seeing. When the Clean Air Act of 1959 finally started to bite, Sheffield city council's first official image-builder, the irrepressible Peter Wigley, tracked down kids from other cities (reported to call Sheffield 'Stinkyville' as they flew past) and frogmarched them round the east end to prove the air was healthily breathable after all.
But we quite liked the smell of hot metal, in the air or on the white mufflers of men taking the bus-ride to clock on for the 'Sheffield Shift'. Those huge, ugly, black works - furnace, forge, melting shop, rolling mill - were the only really distinguished buildings Sheffield had. The smaller businesses left behind some nice enough vernacular brick and stone landmarks, and we all wish we'd found a way of keeping them. But old Sheffield was never going to be an architectural heritage centre.
The cooling towers whose impending loss was mourned in yesterday's Guardian were relative newcomers, but when the green cupola kitsch of Meadowhall shopping centre went up on the other side of the motorway where the steelworks had been, the twin towers were what we had left. They achieved iconic status, not just through aesthetics (they are unusually slender and graceful) but because they meant something about a complicated relationship with heavy industry. Brutal, ugly; they also served the community and gave identity.
But if we are to have a replacement work of public art, who do we trust to commission and execute it? Like other cities, we have a body called Creative Sheffield, but it is a regeneration and development agency and does not have (in the narrow sense of the word at least) a creative person on it. We have a 'hung' city council, and politicians terrified of being associated with spending that some electors might think wasteful or frivolous, even if it's not money available for anything else. The Arts Council, as the handling of the recent cuts showed, currently feels like a 'managing' offshoot of government. Sheffield claims more artists per square foot than any other city outside London. Will one be trusted? Or will there be focus groups, 'consultation' and a committee decision that will minimise risk but is unlikely to take the gamble necessary to have an impact 50 or 100 years from now?
The city has made huge strides in the last half century, mainly thanks to municipal will. Its cultural life has been transformed and we have some fabulous living, working and sporting environments. But a work of visual art as stunning and meaningful as those elegant signifiers of the city's past glory and present aspirations by the motorway? How happy we will be if bureaucracy brings it to pass.
