Team for 2000 fails to agree: Millennium Commission members are confused about what sorts of project deserve funding, reports Marianne Macdonald

MEMBERS of the Millennium Commission, the government- appointed body set up this year to allocate pounds 1.6bn on projects to mark the turn of the century, cannot make up their mindsabout what is millennial.

The nine-strong commission, chosen from Britain's Great and Good, has the task of approving celebratory projects for the year 2000 - and, in doing so, setting off the most grandiose construction bonanza Britain has seen. But they are unsure exactly what they are supposed to be looking for.

Opera houses? Museums? Giant Ferris wheels? Planting trees? Planting hedges? Planting whole forests?

The commission has been told to approve projects which are 'of the millennium', but members admitted last week to being unable to define the phrase; and on Friday, the Secretary of State for National Heritage, Stephen Dorrell, who chairs the commission, said he had no plans to clarify it.

The commission, set up in February by John Major, will allocate one-fifth of the proceeds from the National Lottery starting in November, which means that over five years it will have available about pounds 1.6bn worth of patronage, possibly more - a sum greater than the annual gross national product of at least 50 member states of the United Nations. Half will fund about 12 large-scale urban projects costing about pounds 130m each and half will pay for hundreds of small rural schemes, such as applications from charities to build village halls and plant yews in churchyards.

Proposals are to be considered from December. The commission is barred from making suggestions of its own.

Its members are a gilded group chosen to represent British public life. They include a former editor of the Times, a Scottish aristocratic landowner, two politicians, an Ulster businessman, a woman astronomer and the first black woman QC - but no architects.

Their problem will be deciding just what is suitable to mark the beginning of the third millennium after Christ. Critics have said that the chances of producing a herd of white elephants are high.

In June, Peter Brooke, then Heritage Secretary, said proposals must be for 'exceptionally distinctive projects that are 'of the millennium'.'

Simon Jenkins, former editor of the Times, said last week: 'You've put your finger on the problem, which is, what is 'of the millennium'?' Michael Montague, former chairman of the English Tourist Board, called it 'intangible', while the astronomer Professor Heather Couper, on being told that people were confused, said: 'So are we.'

Mr Dorrell - who on Friday was not quite sure how many members his own commission comprised - remains unmoved. 'Peter's speech sets it out clearly,' he said in his first interview on the subject.

The confusion is significant because commission members are touring the country to explain Britain's biggest-ever artistic spree. They hope submissions will order their thoughts. 'It's a bit like an elephant, you recognise it when you see it,' said Mr Dorrell. '(They) are going to have to be the sort of thing you only recognise when you see it,' Mr Jenkins echoed.

Yet the commission's members differ substantially on what they think is wanted. Mr Dorrell says it is 'something tangible that people will remember, the tangible expression of this generation'. The Earl of Dalkeith is after something with excellence in every aspect, which is original, on a grander scale than usual, and looks 'both to the future and to the past'.

Mr Jenkins hopes for something that 'in some way marks the passage of the century either monumentally or conceptually. But it's got to have a quality so that in another century's time people are able to look at it and say, 'That's what they did in the year 2000'.' And it must not be too familiar a cause. 'We don't want old projects, we want fizz, excitement, panache.'

Professor Couper differs again. 'For me it would be something which represents the move forward into the 21st century. The closest thing I can think of is the new Channel 4 building, which is of materials which couldn't have been used a century ago. It speaks to me of the next century.'

Even by these varying definitions, the projects thought to be front-runners are in difficulty. The Cardiff Bay Opera House Trust, which last week commissioned Zaha Hadid to design a pounds 43m opera house in Cardiff's docklands, is millennial in that its first performance is planned for 2000. It is unclear how it sums up the century.

Mr Dorrell has yet to decide if the Cardiff opera house and similar proposals floated should be considered for funding by the Millennium Commission or the Arts Council: for example, plans for redeveloping London's 'Albertopolis' by linking the South Kensington museums; converting a former London power station to house the Tate's modern art collection; redeeming Stonehenge from squalor; and revamping theSouth Bank complex. But plans for 'greening' Britain would be accepted by the commission because there was no alternative, he said.

He rejects concern that the millennial project could result in white elephants. 'There is a very focused consciousness that people have of the danger of a herd of white elephants. It is perfectly true that the danger exists.'

The commission had learnt the lessons of the past - such as the spiralling building costs of the British Library - and would if necessary consult private sector organisations, such as Glyndebourne, that had carried out successful building projects, he said.

Another delicate issue will be deciding what are the 'business-as-usual ideas dressed up with a thin veneer of celebration' that Mr Brooke declared should be vetoed. By this token one of the best proposals floated so far must be the architect David Marks's idea for a Ferris wheel on the site of the Jubilee Gardens standing 200ft above Big Ben.

Other examples that have come to the ears of the commission include a plan for promoting churches as places for the display of art, an idea from what Mr Jenkins refers to as a 'dreary Northern city' for a grand gateway at its exit from the motorway, and for a scheme to link two canals.

There is a potential Domesday Book-style project for providing a snapshot of flora and fauna at the turn of the century, and a request for funding for breast cancer research.

Possible schemes also include replanting the Caledonian Forest in Scotland and replanting hedges across Britain. Professor Couper says that the latter could be interpreted as millennial because it would demonstrate to different generations 'how we were feeling about the country - not just interested in steel, glass and chrome but looking to the trees that built ships for our navy and built our history'.

Despite - or perhaps because of - such explanations, applicants remain bemused. Anyone who can come up with an imaginative, innovative, dreamy, never-tried-for-funding-before, distinctive, different, backward-looking, forward-looking, celebratory, grander-than-usual, high-quality-in-every-aspect bid, which has fizz and panache and is 'of the millennium', surely deserves not only the money but a seat on the board.

(Photograph omitted)