NEVER MIND THE DOME
Kenneth Powell unveils some of
the even more 'bizarre' millennium projects
HE MAY have taken a back seat, but John Major is keeping a close and proprietorial watch on the legacy of his government. Hence his anger about the steady 'perver- sion' of the National Lottery. The Lottery, as Major knows, is his single greatest achievement. 'I wanted the child of a tower block to have the same access to arts, sport and culture as the child that is the heir to rolling acres,' he said in the Commons recently — and he meant it. Providing new theatres, art galleries and athletic stadiums, fixing up decaying churches and cricket pavilions and 'saving' everything from bat colonies to rare books without spending taxpayers' money was a brilliant wheeze. The Lottery was an equally inspired response to the charge that Tories don't care about 'the quality of life'. Forget the Festival of Britain — Lot- tery cash could fund a non-stop festival extending far into the future. But there was one particular priority: celebrating the millennium.
The arts, sport and heritage lotteries were all top-ups, in effect, of responsibili- ties already assumed, to a greater or lesser degree, by the state — so switching the money from opera houses or historic buildings to education and health, as the Blair government seems set on doing, isn't really such a revolutionary move. (Tabloid calls for more money for blind babies, can- cer research and OAPs' treats helped pre- pare the ground for what John Major calls the 'lightning raid' on the Lottery.) But the Millennium Commission, with originally a fifth of Lottery receipts to spend, was something entirely novel. It was 'a means of realising visions,' said Peter Brooke in 1994; 'we should seek to capture the spirit of our age in enduring landmarks that symbolise our hopes for the future.' Let cynics mock, but Peter Brooke really believed that 2000 years of Christianity were something to celebrate.
The Millennium Dome was not yet on the agenda in 1994, though a millennium festival was already being discussed. (The Dome, as Michael Heseltine insists, is essentially a Tory project. It is Peter Man- delson, rightly, who will carry the can if the contents are as dire as they look likely to be, but what if, against the odds, the Greenwich Festival is a popular success?) The Dome so dominates discussion of the millennium celebrations that little attention has been given to the other 'landmark' pro- jects, though they are mopping up most of the Millennium Commission's money one and a quarter billion pounds of it. Britain's answer to the French grands pro- jets and a lifeline for recession-hit architects — with scope for 'British indi- viduality, or even eccentricity' (Mr Brooke hoped) — these schemes were to be of world class.
Nobody could have envisaged, less than five years ago, the extraordinary mix of the inspirational, the bizarre, the invaluable and the plain banal that make up the final list of millennium 'landmark' projects. There are some real duds. How did the transparently inappropriate 'renaissance of Portsmouth Harbour' secure £40 million of Lottery cash for a 'leisure complex' that will permanently ruin one of the great his- toric sites of Europe? Why did the Millen- nium Commission accede to the dumping of Zaha Hadid's Cardiff Bay Opera House, one of the few millennium projects that was as remarkable as the Sydney Opera House or New York's Guggenheim Muse- um, only to pour funds into an abysmal replacement scheme? How could the Com- mission consider Daniel Libeskind's V&A `spiral' to be 'insufficiently distinctive'? You may hate the designs, which appear to be bound for the dustbin, but they are dis- tinctive. Does Liverpool really need a Dis- covery Park with a 'space/time machine', at a cost of £91 million, or Hull a £36 million aquarium? How did the South Wales mafia, having (to use a Majorism) 'pervert- ed' the Opera House project, land another £46 million to tear down the perfectly usable Cardiff Arms Park and build a mil- lennium stadium? The current price of the stadium is £121 million — and rising fast. Moreover, it won't even be completed for the 1999 World Cup, which was supposed to launch it in style. Ironically, since they were all conceived and approved before the last election, the `landmark' schemes too often reflect New Labour's desire to offload the arts/culture budget on to the private sector. So decent local museums are starved of funds or even closed while half a dozen or more extravagant popular science centres, with hefty admission charges and a nice line in fusing entertainment and education, get lashings of Lottery money. The net effect — not one Peter Brooke ever imagined, I guess — could be a body blow to Britain's museum system. When the millennium fol- lies begin to go bust, it will be to local (and, in future, regional) government that they will turn for sustenance.
The millennium commissioners, includ- ing non-political worthies like Simon Jenk- ins and Sir John Hall, were, of course, given a hard task in deciding priorities. But the decision to vest the chairmanship of the Commission in the person of the Her- itage (now Culture) Secretary was a fatal mistake, leaving it wide open to political pressure. Fear, or actual hatred, of elitism now so pervades Tory and Labour ranks, that killing off opera houses is seen as a vote winner. With Labour's devolution programme just over the horizon, the Commission under Virginia Bottomley was bound to humour the regions and pour money into Welsh and Scottish projects, however dubious. Northern Ireland, of course, got £45 million for the usual edu- cation, entertainment and sports mix, no questions asked.
Not surprisingly, some of the best mil- lennium schemes are the big London ones — the pragmatic, value-for-money Tate Bankside conversion and Sir Norman Fos- ter's reconstruction of the British Muse- um, a truly national (and, indeed, international) institution. My only regret about the latter is that Foster was not encouraged to carry the scheme to its logi- cal conclusion and make the Reading Room — replaced by the unspeakable new British Library — into a great sculpture court, the real heart of the place. Public discussion of all these schemes has not been encouraged by the secretive and defensive attitude of the Millennium Commission (which is still, incidentally, sitting on 90 per cent of its Lottery receipts, waiting for the claims to come in). As one of the organisers of a recent symposium on the subject, I found that the natural reaction of many of the Com- mission's 'clients' was equally unhelpful, as if they had something to hide and had been rumbled. Perhaps this isn't surpris- ing. Some of the newly formed charities and trusts, with no track record, can hard- IY believe the largesse that has come their way.
So where are the 'enduring landmarks' for the millennium? Top marks for sheer initiative must go to the city fathers of Sal- ford, who branded their proposed arts cen- tre with the name of a truly popular artist, LS. Lowry — Cardiff should have capi- talised on Shirley Bassey — and got cash from the arts and heritage Lotteries as well as the Millennium Commission. The Lowry Centre — well on course, unlike other millennium schemes, to open in 2000 — also makes sense in the light of the regeneration of Salford Quays, launched in the 1980s. Norwich's `Technopolis', a regrettable title, will provide a high- quality modern building (by Michael Hop- kins, of Glyndebourne and Lord's fame) in the heart of the old city. The Millennium Seed Bank in Sussex, in the safe hands of the Royal Botanic Gardens, combines a valuable scientific priority — conserving thousands of threatened plant species and researching their protection — with an intelligent approach to public education, rather than the provision of another 'expe- rience'.
Sheffield, a city where the reality is on occasions worse than the depressing fiction of The Full Monty, has got the funding (£20 million from the Lottery) for a new winter garden, a modern update of the Crystal Palace idea, with an art gallery and public spaces which will finally give the city a real focus. (Too many of the big Lottery schemes are on the city-edge sites favoured by superstores.) South Yorkshire, in fact, has done well out of the millennium, with funding for the Earth Centre near Doncaster, where there is to be a truly remarkable building by the innovative Future Systems practice, and for the Magna project at Rotherham, a conver- sion of an almost extinct building type, the steelworks. A matter of making amends for the carnage of industry in the Thatcher era? Perhaps, but the millennium land- marks are the monuments to another ver- sion of Toryism, which died with the last election. Major's millennium monuments include some real corkers alongside the fol- lies — the Tories would be ill-advised to let Labour steal the millennium show, and positively foolish to disown the biggest boost for British architecture since the commercial building boom of the Eighties.
`0 Lord I beseech thee, grant me the strength and tenacity to bluff my way out of sleaze and fraud accusations.'
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