DOME. SWEET DOME?

Build it and they will come or perhaps not. The Millennium Dome was supposed to be an emblem of Britain's future, but it didn't exactly turn out as hoped, recalls Jonathan Glancey

- Jonathan Glancey

Where did they go? The five-and-a-half million people who failed to attend the Millennium Experience in 2000? All they had to do was trek to the Millennium Dome, built on a windwhipped bend of the Thames on the tip of the Greenwich peninsula, for a big day out.

If they had bothered, they would have made up that crucial 12 million – the number that, if reached, would have placed this much-hyped affair on a financially sound footing. As it was, the missing millions sealed the Millennium Dome’s fate as being something of a national embarrassment; a “millennium experience” that, 25 years on, we would all rather forget.

This national celebration was declared by the New Labour prime minister to be the “triumph of confidence over cynicism, boldness over blandness, excellence over mediocrity”. For Tony Blair, it was personal. An outing to the Millennium Experience was to be the greatest day in the life of his son Euan. Or so he said.

You can see why he might have wanted to believe it. The Cool Britannia vibes and the values of Blair’s New Labour government were to be embodied within the tent-like structure of the 48-acre dome, designed by a team led by Mike Davies of the Richard Rogers Partnership.

Richard Rogers was a celebrated architect and a supporter of the Blair government. In partnership with Rose Gray, Ruthie Rogers, Richard’s wife, fronted the River Cafe 12 miles upriver of Greenwich. The River Cafe was a fashionable meeting place for New Labour politicians and their apparatchiks, and those riding high in the worlds of art, design, property, high finance and the media.