Dome truths

It was 50 years ago today, Sergeant Pepper taught the band to play. The result was a popular masterpiece. Thirty years later, a less accomplished, tone-deaf group of individuals collaborated on the Millennium Dome, and the result was an expensive, sniggerable calamity. For a while, I was one of them.

Of course, it was not really a ‘Dome’ at all, since a dome is a sophisticated self-supporting masonry structure and this was just a big, stupid, hemispherical fabric tent. But ‘Millennium Tent’ did not have rhetorical resonance sufficient to burnish the already very bright and shiny egos of its perpetrators during the Blair Dawn.

In any organisation, lots of stuff goes wrong a lot of the time, as Murphy’s Law states. But here was an organisation where — remarkably — everything went wrong all of the time. The problems began with that signature tent by Richard Rogers.

So far from being an intelligent response to a carefully considered client need, its design pre-existed anybody having a clue what to put in it.