Name me one thing that millennium funding has done for us? There probably is a new aqueduct somewhere among the legions of new buildings and structures marching promiscuously the length and breadth of Britain since the various arms of the Millennium Commission began distributing vast sums of money for heroic new capital projects a decade ago.
The face of many British cities has been transformed as a result. You would have to look long and hard to find one today without a millennium centre of one kind or another. Where once there was the ubiquitous Victoria memorial or grand municipal public convenience, all brass, marble and Edwardian flamboyance, today you will almost inevitably come across a mighty millennium-funded museum. At the very least. There may be a millennium conference centre, a millennium park or one of those ambitious multipurpose millennium centres that - big, puffy and "iconic" - no one knows quite what to do with soon after the gala opening.
In my own city, London, millennium funding has created or transformed some of the capital's most popular tourist attractions. Has Lottery money been well spent on these? The numbers can be looked up on the web, or even in a Lottery-funded library (or Idea Store, as we are learning to call stuffy old libraries lined with boring books today). Vibrant, accessible - as they must be to have got funding in the first place - and swimming in cappuccinos, these are the great populist cultural gestures of our times. Their success rests not so much on their design or even their content, but on the number of people who pass through them. And who would dare to stand up today and criticise such a democratic investment in popular culture?
True, Tate Modern, the former Bankside Power Station transformed into a powerhouse of modern art, resembles a cross between Gatwick Airport on a summer bank holiday and the Bluewater shopping mall in the weeks leading up to Christmas. It is a real crush. But the figures are there to show that it is an enormous, critic-defying success. The Millennium - or No Longer Wobbly - Bridge, by Foster, Arup and Anthony Caro, is another considerable success. A fascinating structure - a suspension bridge laid flat - it is rarely less than crowded, bearing several million visitors a year from St Paul's Cathedral to Tate Modern.
What such projects appear to have done is opened London up to the experience of the grand European city stroll whereby citizenry, and increasingly tourists, throng principal streets in the early evening, or on Sundays, to see, be seen, eat an ice cream and even make a cursory or polite visit to some plumply funded cultural event.
All this is fine. It is quite remarkable, and rather special, to see so many people eagerly thronging the south bank of the Thames as it winds along the fringe of Southwark, a borough that, always fascinating for Londoners, was until very recently well below the salt. Perhaps, then, it is not so much the millennium buildings we should be so proud of - many are little more than vacuous bunkum - but the ways in which prodigious funding has helped to revitalise our city centres, many of them tired and a little purposeless after the industrial decline and fallout of the 1970s and 1980s.
There remains, though, something rather sad about the way so many of our cities, clearly in need of more than a wash and brush up, have invested so heavily in the external trappings of this Lottery-funded culture. So much of this new, vibrant, accessible, 24-hour, millennium culture seems to be either imposed on British cities, squawking for investment like chicks in a nest, or else imported wholesale from London and other European capitals as if every city today must have exactly the same cultural venues, tourist destinations, events and concerns.
Although it has been good in recent years to see the great northern cities pulling themselves up by the Velcro of their smart trainers (officially, bootstraps went out with whippets, pies, pigeon-fancying and Hilda Ogden's hairnet), and to find the banks of the Tyne lined with one inclusive, accessible, vibrant, etc, arts venue after the other, it has been not so good to see these same cities lose, throw away or be stripped of the cultures that once made them both distinctive and important.
As I write, the old Vulcan Works in Merseyside is being demolished. This was where Stephenson built locomotives for the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, where locomotives were exported worldwide into the age of diesel and electric traction. The site was most recently owned by French and German companies, because the British today loathe and despise manufacturing, especially when there is easy money to be had from the Lottery, from flogging off the public sector, and from the supremely crass and wilfully patronising new Labour casinos coming to a city centre near you very soon. Will these be Lottery-funded, too? It would make sense. The site of the old Vulcan Works is being cleared for junk housing and downmarket chain stores.
In the past, British towns and cities were known by their various expertise, whether this was cotton from Manchester, lace from Nottingham, locomotives from Swindon, Glasgow, Doncaster, Horwich and Crewe. Today, they all share the same post-industrial, retail-era, caffe-latte culture, propped up by Lottery-fuelled architecture, design and events. Stripped of their historic and distinctive roles, all too many British towns and cities have gone begging to the Lottery, or else been fed by it, as if to keep their citizens sweet.
This is the dark side of Lottery funding. There is, though, another side, which has proved a national delight in very many ways - notably, the work of the Heritage Lottery Fund. Imaginative and generous, this often august body has reached out to fund old and batty museums, the restoration of historic aircraft, ships and locomotives, the construction of the glorious Welsh Highland Railway, the building of the quietly dignified American Air Museum at Duxford and numerous other projects that have the power to delight most of us in one way or another.
So many of these have been low-key or gentle schemes, ones in which local people are genuinely involved, and which stem from local and passionately held enthusiasms. They are the stuff of a culture emanating from, and truly loved by, people of all classes, creeds, ages, incomes and parts of the country. This really is an achievement to be proud of, a lottery that has worked for the common good. Don't expect the new casinos to do anything like the same.
