Mandelson’s ‘Millennium Dome experience’ is a 25-year-old nightmare Britain would rather forget
With some of the brightest design talent in Britain working on it, the national celebration was meant to be a triumph of confidence over cynicism, boldness over blandness and excellence over mediocrity. Except it didn’t exactly turn out that way, remembers Jonathan Glancey
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Where did they go? The five-and-a-half million people who failed to attend the Millennium Experience in 2000? All they had to do was trek to the Millennium Dome, built on a wind-whipped bend of the Thames on the tip of the Greenwich peninsula, for a big day out. If they had bothered, they would have made up that crucial 12 million – the number that, if reached, would have placed this much-hyped affair on a financially sound footing. As it was, the missing millions sealed the Millennium Dome’s fate as being something of a national embarrassment; a “millennium experience” that, 25 years on, we would all rather forget.
This national celebration was declared by the New Labour prime minister to be the “triumph of confidence over cynicism, boldness over blandness, excellence over mediocrity”. For Tony Blair, it was personal. An outing to the Millennium Experience was to be the greatest day in the life of his son Euan. Or so he said.
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You can see why he might have wanted to believe it. The Cool Britannia vibes and the values of Blair’s New Labour government were to be embodied within the tent-like structure of the 48-acre dome, designed by a team led by Mike Davies of the Richard Rogers Partnership.
Richard Rogers was a celebrated architect and a supporter of the Blair government. In partnership with Rose Gray, Ruthie Rogers, Richard’s wife, fronted the River Cafe 12 miles upriver of Greenwich. The River Cafe was a fashionable meeting place for New Labour politicians and their apparatchiks, and those riding high in the worlds of art, design, property, high finance and the media.
While the architects and their engineers, Buro Happold, came up with a rather ingenious big tent for Greenwich, the question of what would go inside it was never answered with any degree of certainty or conviction. Run by civil servants and politicians, the Millennium Experience Company was as uncreative as it was secretive and even paranoid. It chose to have the diplomatic skills of a rat backed into a corner.
The press was its No 1 enemy. Having taken against it from day one in 1996, when I was this newspaper’s architecture and design editor and the Millennium Experience a pet project of John Major’s Conservative government, I experienced quite a bit of defensive aggression.
As I wrote in my 2001 book London: Bread and Circuses, “To criticise the project was, in the eyes of New Labour politicians, tantamount to sedition. Championed by Peter Mandelson, the sinister minister-without-portfolio, it promised visitors the most fantastic day out in their lives.
“Well, not quite so fantastic as walking the dog in Greenwich Park or going to get some chips. Not very fantastic at all really. The Millennium Experience, its entrance flanked by a branch of McDonald’s, proved to be an exhibition of corporate sponsorship. The future the Dome was meant to represent appeared to have something to do with burgers, out-of-order rides and commercial propaganda. The next-door neighbour’s cat could have told us that for the price of a tin of Whiskas.”
The whole caboodle was to cost the equivalent of 2 billion tins of cat food. My beef was that the money would be better spent on projects of enduring value, like constructing a magnificent new natural landscape over the horrendous M3 Winchester bypass that had slashed through Twyford Down a few years earlier. Projects that could be spread around these islands, that nobody would object to and everyone else would surely enjoy.
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What, I asked readers of The Independent, if we could spend the money allocated to the Dome on buildings that would outlive the ordained millennium year? Something like Zaha Hadid’s Cardiff Bay Opera House, an imaginative project fully thought through in terms of structure and design, which had been unceremoniously rejected for funding by the Millennium Commission and dismissed by local councils and the tabloid press.
As at least one reader suggested, if Zaha wasn’t good enough for Cardiff, why not let her build her “glass necklace” opera house on the Greenwich peninsula? The Dome was built here, and rapidly so – appearing, wrote Nancy Banks-Smith, the veteran TV critic who lived opposite it, “like a jellyfish washed up on the shore”.
In charge of the project, Mandelson visited Disneyland Florida in search of inspiration – as far from Cool Britannia as you could get. What to put in a tent bigger than Green Park? For six months, Stephen Bayley, founding CEO of London’s Design Museum, tried his best to be the Millennium Experience’s creative director. He believed the Dome should reveal a dazzling glimpse into the future, much as the 1939-40 New York World’s Fair had done with its memorable “The World of Tomorrow” theme. It was not to be.
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Instead, hard-pressed designers were sat on by cadres of political advisers known as “content editors”, their role similar to that of the Soviet political commissars embedded in the Red Army. There were to be 14 “zones” given over to themes including Body, Faith, Mind, Work, Learning, Play and, most importantly, Money – nearly all as forgettable as they were dim-witted, even when designed by architects of noted ingenuity and skill, among them Zaha Hadid, Nigel Coates and Eva Jiricna. The huge space in the centre was dedicated to a regular trapeze performance with music composed by Peter Gabriel, of Genesis and Selling England by the Pound album fame.
The most important “zone”, however, was evidently the 500-seat branch of McDonald’s sited at the Dome’s entrance. This was the biggest Maccy D’s in Western Europe. “It was the perfect match for the Dome experience,” said Barrie Flack, McDonald’s Restaurants’ director of design. Who could disagree? To cement this convenient marriage of form, content and comestible, there was a second McDonald’s inside.
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Was it all tosh? I last went to see the Dome shortly before it opened, but never in 2000. According to Bayley, writing about it in The Observer in 2007, “When asked, David Hockney said it would be best left empty, but New Labour abhorred a vacuum so it was filled with patronising rubbish. And when that was cleared away, it was left in pitiable desuetude. Little of the promised regeneration [of the area] was stimulated by its presence, and a fine new Tube station at North Greenwich by Will Alsop promised only the grating absurdity of delivering 30,000 passengers an hour to visit diddly squat.”
Since then, crowds have come to North Greenwich for pop concerts held in The O2, a music arena constructed inside the Dome. Their experience is certainly better than that of the people who told me about the opening party, when a throng of VIPs and newspaper editors were held up for hours in the cold, trying to get from Stratford station and through security to the Dome, by the pitiful sight of a clearly unhappy Queen, who had come by boat, holding hands with Blair and singing “Auld Lang Syne”. It was clear to anyone watching that she would probably have been happier celebrating new year as she normally did, at Sandringham.
Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of would-be revellers had made their way along the banks of the Thames to witness a spectacular “River of Fire” racing along the river at 700mph, which proved to be nothing more than a damp squib. To top it all off, there were no public lavatories along the bladder-chilling way.
There are those who claim to have enjoyed their day out at the Dome in 2000 – a day out in town is a day out in town, after all – yet spun and doctored, and all smoke and mirrors, this baffling national mind game closed on 31 December 2000, a day ahead of the new millennium.
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