Can a makeover erase the Millennium Dome's hapless past?
In June 1997, six weeks after he became Prime Minister, Tony Blair promised the nation that the Millennium Experience, to be held in the as-yet unbuilt Millennium Dome, would be "the most exciting thing to happen anywhere in the world in the year 2000". It is probable that we only survived such thermonuclear hubris because we - well, most of us - were still rejoicing at having got rid of the Tories. He could have claimed that his accession to the premiership was the most exciting thing to happen anywhere in the world, ever, and we'd have clapped like sea lions in agreement.
Putting aside the self-evident silliness of that claim - one doubts that anyone who got married that year or became a parent, or who, like Kylie Minogue, closed the Sydney Olympics by performing on a giant flip-flop, would have agreed - it's probably fair to say that Blair was trying to correct, at one stroke, the post-Empire belief that we're a bit rubbish. If the Great Exhibition of 1851 had some claim to being the western world's most awe-inspiring public event of that year, we had, by the time of the Festival of Britain a hundred years later, scaled down our ambitions.
Snooty observers felt that the 1951 festival was full of tack. It was, after all, meant to be the government's treat for a war-battered nation. Blair had a similar excuse, in a way: those who'd been battered by Thatcherism also deserved a lift. But in that one word, "exciting", he revealed his true intention.
The Millennium Experience showed up the real meaning of the "new" in new Labour: it meant the end of history and the triumph of postmodernism, which snuck up from the right in the 1980s and ended up absorbing the left, too. He could have said "enriching", or "thought-provoking", but he didn't. For the unanchored extrovert Blair, "exciting" is what the Dome had to be.
On 18 June, the historian Tristram Hunt wrote angrily of those charged with developing the Thames Gateway: "Inspiring them is the vast, hubristic symbol of the Millennium Dome - a building whose conscious rejection of meaning and memory stands as the entry arch to the Gateway development." Ouch. The Dome, for seven years a stark pimple on the semi-industrial blankness of north Greenwich, is now being enveloped by flats, hotels and corporate overspill from Canary Wharf.
On the eve of the Millennium Experience's closure in December 2000, Michael Leapman, writing in the NS, called it "a theme park without a theme". I visited the themeless theme park twice: amid much guff there was plenty to see that was, indeed, enriching and thought-provoking. The overall feeling upon leaving, however, was like having eaten a whole bag of pick-and-mix sweets: good fun, but insubstantial and ultimately nauseating.
You could almost say the same thing of the Dome's new incarnation as The O2. It does have a theme, I suppose, which is roughly along the lines of "Come in, amuse yourselves to death!". The big tent is big enough to accommodate just about every commodified entertainment experience - gah, that word again - it is possible to have, with room left over. There's a multiplex cinema whose main screen is the biggest in Europe; several dozen bars and restaurants; an exhibition space that will hold the forthcoming Tutankhamun exhibition; an indoor piazza that will host regular free events; a nightclub and two music venues, the 2,350-capacity IndigO2 and the 20,000-seat O2 arena.
That's not all, though. This cornucopia of stimuli - dubbed by its owners, the AEG Group, "the entertainment district" - is clustered around a "real" street, with a red-brick pavement, street lamps and food outlets on either side. Like most real streets in south-east London, it's lined with giant palm trees. You can say one thing, though: the Dome's seven-year-old canopy is now a dirty grey, giving the whole scene an authentic overcast look. While AEG is promising to return the canopy to pristine condition in the coming months, the sheer fakeness of this plonked-down street is haunting.
Moving swiftly on - as you would be advised to do when visiting the complex - the O2 does have a monumental saving grace. The O2 arena, which forms the Dome's centrepiece, is a stunning and necessary new venue for music events and indoor sport. Even if it doesn't know how to create a sort-of public space that doesn't look like a midwestern shopping mall, AEG knows how to do giant venues. It owns and runs many of the world's most profitable sports and music arenas, including the Staples Centre in Los Angeles.
The O2 is one of the few purpose-built music venues in London. The Dome's tent remained intact, but its contents were demolished and the new arena built from scratch inside. The grim London Dockland Arena, recently bulldozed, was a converted banana warehouse, and had all the acoustics of one, while Wembley Arena, originally named the Empire Pool, was built for the Empire Games in the 1930s.
The latter has had a spruce-up in recent years, but remains a venue you go to only if you're desperate to sit on a plastic chair straining to detect a familiar melody amidst the wall of ricocheting noise. For a regular gig-goer, the O2 arena will feel like the Royal Opera House. Every seat has soft upholstery and a decent view, making the space feel awesome and intimate at the same time.
Most importantly, it feels as though it has been purposely designed as a venue rather than one shoehorned into an old shed. While I haven't heard the acoustics in action yet, I'm assured that the arena uses the most apt and advanced technology available for venues of its size and type.
Until the O2's arrival, Britain - not just London - lacked a comfortable and acoustically sensitive arena of a size required to host the world's big rock and pop acts. When you consider the way in which Britons create and devour live music, this seems extraordinary and seems to show how much discomfort we are prepared to endure in the name of being entertained. A venue of the O2 arena's quality is long overdue.
The O2 has attracted some of the world's best and biggest acts in its opening months: a sign not only of AEG's pulling power, but also of the fact that you'd have to be a loon to want to play Wembley instead. Among others, there's Barbra Streisand, Justin Timberlake, the Scissor Sisters and the Rolling Stones, the latter playing a scaled-down version of their Bigger Bang stadium show.
Babs is charging up to £600 for the stalls and £200 for the vertiginous top rows, while Prince is somehow scraping a living from his 21-date residency despite charging only £31.21 for every seat (the unusual price being a reference to his last album, which was titled 3121).
Not only that, but he's giving away a free copy of his new album to every ticket holder. If that's not a sign to his avaricious peers that they're getting away with murder, I don't know what is. Stuff the market, he seems to be saying, let's please the fans for once. That passes for revolutionary fervour in today's rock music climate.
For some, money will be no object. They're likely to have bought or leased one of the arena's 96 private boxes, which take gig-going luxury to ridiculous levels. If I were Prince, I'd rent the whole lot of them for one night and let the £31.21-paying hordes have a taste of the good life. Which leads me to another observation about the O2. The arena has set a new standard for comfort and quality at mass-market events such as big-name rock gigs and indoor sports meetings. If you can pay to get in, you'll get a good seat.
But while the arena has raised the bar for the average experience of gig-going, the rest of the O2 complex is dispiritingly familiar in the way it holds up artifice as a kind of standard. To repeat Hunt's words, it symbolises the "conscious rejection of meaning and memory" that the Dome represented from its outset. It can't just be a good, fun place to go on payday; it has to be an "entertainment district" that tries to meet all your leisure needs at once.
It might meet Tony Blair's definition of "exciting", but it sure doesn't meet mine.
Post this article to
We want to encourage people to comment on our content and to exchange views with other readers and hope this will be done on a courteous basis. However, if you encounter posts which are offensive please let us know by emailing comments@newstatesman.co.uk and we will take swift action where necessary.
