A key piece within Sheffield's Cultural Industries Quarter, the bar opened in 1999 as part of a £3.3m lottery funded programme of expansion for the city's arts cinema, exhibition spaces and design studios. The bar offered a social focus for an area, which, while successful in attracting creative business, had displayed a limited public face. Its success helped encourage development of other establishments in the area, presenting the City with a vibrant new destination. The bar was partially refitted in 2005 by others, but up until that point had proven extremely popular and had grown far beyond its original remit, to offer a meeting place for a diverse cross section of urban culture.

The project, designed within the constraints of a pre-defined shell and a tight building programme, employed notions of cutting and folding to resolve the complex geometry of the given space and to describe a complex surface and a number of acoustic chambers within its construction - reducing sound transmission to the cinemas. It explored notions of cinematic space, distorting form, scale and perspective and juxtaposed a range of materials and textures - oak, stainless steel, rubber, cast glass and cast aluminium, to describe different scales of inhabitation within the larger space.