WI: The Millennium Dome Was A Success?

ninebucks

Banned
The general consensus in the UK was that the entire Millennium Dome project was a flop, and that the dome itself was a bit naff and underwhelming. This inevitably ended up embarrassing Tony Blair's government.

But I would argue that most of the reason why the Dome failed was because people were coming at it from a bad perspective - almost willing it to fail.

But what if people were generally more optimistic towards the project? And what if it eventually ended up turning a profit and becoming a success for Blair's government? What tone would this have set and how different would British society have been over the noughties? What would have been the effect on the Labour government?
 
Um...

If it had actually had a purpose to begin with, rather than a wooly "build it and they will come" attitude, that would have helped a great deal. For instance, the purpose of the Great Exhibition, AFAIK, was "let's show off how brilliant we are".

Oh, and not costing close to £1bn would also help. The original Crystal Palace cost c. £150,000 - in today's money, somewhere between £12m and £120m.
 
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Interestingly roughly the same number of people visited the Dome as the Great Exhibition of 1851. However as a proportion of the population that visited the numbers were smaller.
 
Maybe, the concept of celebrating the Millenium itself, was the main problem with the Dome's construction, in that it was only given a 4 year deadline by the John Major Government, when the project was initated in early 1996...
Maybe if the project had been given a longer Deadline, say if it had been initated in 1994 or earlier, it might have had a better chance of acceptance by the general public..
You could argue however, that compared to the German & Swiss Millennium debacles, the dome was moderately successful...
The German millienium celebration Expo 2000, held in Bremen (?) cost the Germans some £1.5 Billion (and the directors their liberty as a result), & as for the Swiss version, that was 2 years late...
(The Swiss Millenium Expo, intended for a opening date of 1st Jan 2000, was only completed by August 2002, & lasted for 3 months (1st Oct- 31st Dec 2002)).

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Just my humble opinion, but the Dome was a sucess.....

Let me explain. It was a complete flop for it's designed purpose, yes. However afterwards - since it became the O2 Arena, it has been a massive sucess. A big, popular venue, in the heart of London that makes money.
 
Just my humble opinion, but the Dome was a sucess.....

Let me explain. It was a complete flop for it's designed purpose, yes. However afterwards - since it became the O2 Arena, it has been a massive sucess. A big, popular venue, in the heart of London that makes money.

In that case, how can we make it seem more of a sucess in 2000.
 
Um...

If it had actually had a purpose to begin with, rather than a wooly "build it and they will come" attitude, that would have helped a great deal. For instance, the purpose of the Great Exhibition, AFAIK, was "let's show off how brilliant we are".

Oh, and not costing close to £1bn would also help. The original Crystal Palace cost c. £150,000 - in today's money, somewhere between £12m and £120m.

Word.

The main problem with the Dome was that it was set down before anyone had any idea what it's purpose would be. And it never really found one which caught the public imagination. Being horribly mis-managed and running massively overbudget didn't help either.

I would suggest that the Dome was designed to fail. We are not living in 1949 anymore, and the Festival of Britain was largely what the Dome was designed to ape. People will not pay for tat anymore, even high-tech tat. They have higher expectations when they are paying £20 a head. Refusing to pay that for something like the Dome is not willing it to fail, it is basic financial common sense.

Tbh, the best thing you could do was make the Dome a 100% no-bullshit theme park with some token cultural offerings. IOTL it became a bizzare triple-cross between a theme park, an exhibition, and a musuem, with none of those tendencies playing strongly. I am not sure what the reception would be if the government announced it was going into competition with Alton Towers, however, even on a temporary basis. And of course, there is very little cultural pretension with a theme park.

Or, the government could have simply done the decent thing and never pretended it could successfully build and run a huge project like the dome to being with.
 
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MrP

Banned
Would it be worth pointing out that the actual Millennium was 2001, not 2000 (there was no 0 AD)?
I suppose that might give us an extra year to work with. ;) However, the fact that this accurate opinion is a minority one really won't help get more people in.

I honestly can't think of anything about the Dome that enticed me, even for a second, to consider visiting it. That's no bad thing necessarily; I have no plans to visit Old Trafford, but Man U aren't going to collapse financially. I don't fancy going to the British Museum on a monthly basis, but it's still pootling along. Art galleries I feel I should visit - but that's mainly intellectual snobbery swiftly swept away by seeing modern artistic endeavours and suffering an upswell of, er, taste-based snobbery. :D

I would add to V-J's point about spending £20 on something I'm not interested in, the unfortunate association made by much of the country about sticking something in London. That sits ill with a lot of non-Londoners for obvious provincial reasons, but also renders it jolly unlikely that anyone from the corners of the kingdom will visit it unless they chance to be in London on other business. I should mention that the effective anti-publicity for the Dome (seen greatly in my newspaper, ISTR) was actually helped by the government whinging about said denigration.
 

Thande

Donor
I maintain that it would have succeeded if they'd just bought the site for at least five years rather than one - it's ridiculous to expect any place like that to turn a profit in one year.

I don't know where people get the idea that no-one went to the Dome. I went there twice, in summer 2000 and just before Christmas, and both times (especially the latter) the place was absolutely packed.
 

Thande

Donor
Probably because the Dome's organisers predicted it would attract 12m people.

It eventually attracted around half of that.

Well from my experience they overestimated its capacity then. Assuming the days I visited on were roughly average, double that would have made it a Japanese-cyberpunk-city level of overcrowded misery.
 
I suspect the 12m figure had more to do with finance than anything else. There was not much incentive for the management to downplay the visitors numbers, considering the Dome was more or less permanently insolvent.

Probably they looked at what sort of numbers they would need to break even and went with that. Money was only going to be recouped through punters and they needed to give the impression they would flood in.
 
I maintain that it would have succeeded if they'd just bought the site for at least five years rather than one - it's ridiculous to expect any place like that to turn a profit in one year.

I don't know where people get the idea that no-one went to the Dome. I went there twice, in summer 2000 and just before Christmas, and both times (especially the latter) the place was absolutely packed.


Same, well i only went there once but it was packed
 
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