The Public arts centre in West Bromwich sits among its tattered neighbours like a piece of couture clothing in a pound shop. Infamous both for its radical design and for guzzling mind-boggling amounts of public money, its grand opening last June - three years behind schedule and £20m over budget - was not quite the party it might have been. While the Arts Council, who handed over nearly £30m (Sandwell borough council and other funders stumped up £35m) stuck to its line on the "power of cultural regeneration", the project's detractors, not least local residents, haggled over whether or not the community should have been given something more practical, like a swimming pool or a cinema complex. Today, though the ground floor is open - with its cafes and Pinktank area, where art workshops are held by day and local bands play at night - the futuristic interactive art gallery at the very heart of the vision for The Public remains closed, dogged by devastating technical and financial problems.
Earlier this year, the Arts Council, which has also contributed over £500,000 a year to the gallery's running costs since 2005, sent in two independent assessors, who concluded that its "cutting-edge" technology was already dated. Some of the interactive exhibits seemed outmoded; others didn't work at all. The gallery's complex technical specifications mean the systems are vulnerable to breakdown. In February this year, the Arts Council "reluctantly" pulled the plug.
The project has been beset by problems from the start. It was conceived 20 years ago by Sylvia King, the energetic then-director of Jubilee Arts, who envisaged a futuristic "hub" that would give local kids somewhere to go. Her heart was in the right place - Sandwell is rated the 16th most deprived area in the country, with record levels of illness and unemployment. But any brief containing the words "futuristic" should probably, architecturally speaking, have been regarded with extreme caution. The architect Will Alsop, who came up with the radical design, defended the curious black box with its pink jelly-bean windows and floating, wall-less galleries even as his company went into receivership. The building was finished by another firm of architects, Flannery & de la Pole. Then, in 2006, having galloped wildly over budget, the project itself went into administration. Sandwell borough council, a body perhaps more suited to running swimming pools and cinema complexes than someone else's futuristic dream, was left to pick up the pieces.
Today the centre is awash with new appointments. John Garrett, who heads up adult and community services, has found himself in the position of chief visionary, though it's possible that his career to date - working his way up through social-care management - may not have prepared him for the task. He asks me to be cautious in discussing the future of the gallery, which is still in administration, but what he will say is that there are "big plans" and "new thinking" and "the way forward" is "to draw more people in". Well, quite. "This isn't really what councils do," a press officer says with some understatement, "but we're having to turn our hand to it." Linda Saunders, the council's chief librarian, has been put in charge of the building's day-to-day running.
There are plans for the empty upper floors to be opened up to tenants - "entrepreneurial types", Garrett says. "The focus will be on job creation in the creative industries." The Arts Council has agreed a final one-off grant of £3m - subject to approval of the new business plan, "because it would be a real tragedy if all that investment is lost". And Sandwell will spend another £1m a year on running costs.
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Some local councillors argue that this is simply throwing good money after bad. "But we should be ambitious and visionary. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't," counters Louise Wylie, the Arts Council's spokesperson, fuming at the implication that Sandwell might not be ready for such an experiment. She points to the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, and Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, initially a very troubled project, now thriving. "Our mission is to provide access to great art for everyone," she says firmly. "And that includes the people of Sandwell."