The millennium dome: Sponsoring, meaning and visiting

The New Millennium Experience (NME)—the centrepiece of which was an exposition in a dome-shaped tent of fibreglass on a south-eastern peninsula of the Thames at Greenwich during the year 2000—has been the object of immense public controversy in Britain. In terms of column inches and broadcast time, the Millennium Dome was the biggest news story of the year. It was generally depicted as a cultural disaster, staggering like a drunk from one crisis to another one, and a constant drain on public money in order to stave off bankruptcy. For a government that had claimed with such hubris that the New Millennium Experience would be the very symbol of New Labour Britain and publicise its vanguard position in the world, “the disastrous Dome” was an enormous political embarrassment. The irony was exquisite since this government was supposed to be more fiscally prudent than Old Labour. In fact, the NME and its Dome had been attracting much sceptical comment since its announcement as Britain’s special contribution to celebrating the turn of the second and third Christian Millennia under the last Conservative government in the mid 1990s. It was widely acknowledged to be a risk for the incoming Labour government to adopt the Dome from its predecessor in June 1997 when it could still have been cancelled at little expense. During the year of operation and after closure, the eventual disposal and use of the Dome and its site also became a long drawn-out and awkward public issue. The Dome attracted half of its officially projected visitor number, just over six million as opposed to twelve million. To keep going for the whole year, the New Millennium Experience Company (NMEC) requested and received four additional National Lottery grants from the Millennium Commission (MC), the public body charged with disbursing Lottery revenue to projects for marking the turn of the Millennium throughout Britain. The NME swallowed up nearly one-third of the money thus available. Because of its problematical status from beginning