Festival op farce?
pp. 22-23 · Read in the full issue
Britain's giant Millennium Dome debate
TAKE one polluted, old gasworks site, Stg74B million ($A1,933.80 million) and one country’s desire to open the biggest, baddest entertainment complex on December 31, 1999.
The result is a steel-and-fabric, white mushroom so massive it’s already being photographed from space.
Brits call it the Millennium Dome, and while critics complain that it’s no more than an overpriced party tent in Greenwich, officials are betting the dome will attract about 12 million British and overseas visitors by the time it closes on January 1, 2001 (the date, to be precise, that the new millennium actually begins). Besides being an opportunity for entrepreneurs to sell mega amounts
of champagne and fireworks, the advent of 2000 also has challenged Britain and other countries to find ways to publicly and taste fully celebrate the occasion while enticing tourists to their shores.
Top millennium observation contenders so far include France, reopening the Pompidou Centre and building a walkway along the Seine; Germany, hosting Expo 2000 in Hanover; Italy, opening a new Catholic Church of the Year 2000; the Holy Land, building a peace centre in Bethlehem at the historic site of Jesus’ birth and host ing a series of religious concerts; and Fiji, constructing a hollow brick “millennium wall” and filling it with time-capsule mes sages. (Fijians are capitalising on the fact that their country will be one of the first to
see the sun rise on January 1, 2000). But no other country equals Britain in the breadth and scope of its millennium plans, British officials say.
“I don’t know anywhere in the world where so much is being done to mark the millennium or indeed such a major under taking as the Millennium Experience Dome at Greenwich,” said Culture Secretary Chris Smith, one of the project’s overseers.
Visitors, he predicted, will say “wow, this is a fantastic building”, when they enter the 320 m diameter, 46m high domed structure, covered in 83,600 square meters of Teflon coated, glass-fibre fabric stretched over a spider web of steel cables and anchored by a dozen 90m masts. (Visualise a giant white skullcap with a crown of 12 orange coloured spears sticking out of the top.) Inside, there will be a series of 14 educa tional/entertainment “zones” including two giant walk-through human figures and a central performance area with a still uncompleted show said to combine the best elements of West End theatre, carnival and rock concert. Starting in September 1999,
A construction foreman watches members of his crew at work in front of the skeleton of the Millennium Dome in Greenwich, on the South bank of the river Thames near London last year. (AP PHOTO/MAX NASH)
travel agents will be able to include Dome tickets, costing an estimated SAS2 for adults and SA2S for children, in British tour pack ages.
Although Millennium Dome is using only lottery money and no tax funds, and although construction is ahead of schedule, the project has been continually plagued by controversy and speculation, often unfriend ly, over what the thing will actually “con tain”.
The very location for the project, started under the previous Conservative govern ment, was in contention at first. Several other cities wanted the dome, but Greenwich, the south-east London borough that is home to the Royal Observatory, since 1884 the site of Greenwich Mean Time, the prime meridian of O-degree longitude, won out.
After all, this is the place that will tell the world precisely when 2000 kicks off.
After the site was chosen and work began, other problems loomed. Workers extending a subway line to the dome’s entrance began demanding more money and threatening to delay the opening; religious leaders complained that the project’s over sanitised depiction of Christianity left “no room for Jesus at the dome”.
Recently, dome officials were alarmed over reports, apparently false, that several rare birds called redstarts had taken up resi dence in the dome and might force construc tion to halt. British press cynicism over the project continues to run deep. “The dome is a national joke; a party tent stuck out on a toxic little peninsula of estuary London, waiting to be filled by an assortment of wow-factors that has all the appeal of an early-leaming centre,” a writer in the Times of London said. Project officials respond that people laughed at the Sydney Opera House, they laughed at Britain’s Crystal Palace exhibition in 1851. “But when they opened, they were all seen as great successes,” said Michael O’Connor, director of Britain’s Millennium commission, the body that is distributing billions of lottery-fund pounds to the dome and hundreds of other millenni um projects.
Certainly, the dome will have a royal send-off. Queen Elizabeth II will attend the opening on December 31, along with 2,000 other invited guests. After that, the dome will open seven days a week for the next year; tickets must be pre-purchased, and no more than 35,000 visitors will be allowed in at any one time. (KRT) ■