I can answer some of the questions in the OP.
These statistics don’t make much sense unless you have a rough idea what the Dome looks like, but there are images aplenty all over the web.
The Great Dropped Wok of Olde London town (aka Millenium Dome) has an overall diameter of 365 metres (400 yards), an internal diamter of 320m (350 yds) and is 50m (55yds) high at its central point (as high as the Statue of Liberty without the base). It encloses a ground floor area of over 80,000 square metres (87,500 square yards). Its floor area could accommodate about 1,100 Olympic swimming pools, and the Eiffel Tower put on its side would fit inside the Dome with room to spare. Each one of the 12 yellow pylons holding it up is 100m (110 yds) long and weighs 95 metric tonnes (93.5 tons). The Dome’s canopy is roughly 100,000 square metres (109,300 sq yards) in area.
It’s a beautiful, thrilling and awe-inspiring piece of design, engineering and architecture. That’s all that’s good about it.
What’s not good? Well, as others have noted, it is in a stupid location for something deemed a ‘national’ attraction. I live in London and even I found it a pain to get to. For one thing, you cannot get to the Dome by car. By which, I mean (a) there are no roads to it that the public are allowed to use and (b) no car park anyway. Isn’t that just unbelievable?
There was only one other shortlisted location, near Birmingham, which would have made more sense in every way. However, cretinous politicians - probably as corrupt as the day is long - did the choosing… so you can’t expect sense.
The lousy content. The Dome is divided into 14 zones, each with its own theme - ‘education and learning’, ‘play’, ‘communication’, ‘heritage’, ‘faith’ and so on. There was no overall creative or design vision as to the Dome’s purpose, function or style. So various committees of fat lazy-arsed politicians, leeching off the public purse, and none of whom have ever designed or created a damn thing in their entire lives, took it upon themselves to ‘manage’ the content. They selected numerous different design and creative entertainment companies to provide the content for each zone. Of course they made a pig’s ear of every stage of this process: inviting to tender, shortlisting, choosing, managing, co-ordinating and funding. The first government-appointed design consultant, Stephen Byers, jumped ship after less than 12 months on the project, having given up hope of ever getting the political idiots to make a single intelligent comment.
This is a shame. Whatever else may be said about the UK, we actually do have a lot of expertise and very skilled world-class people in the areas of creative design, theme park attractions, public arts and entertainments etc. However, the politicians kept shoving their noses in…
What we ended up with was a truly dire confusion of incoherent themes and areas, compromise, fudge and plain old crap. Some zones try to be ‘fun & entertainment’ areas. They don’t work. Others try to be ‘educational & informative’. They don’t work either. Some zones… well, you just don’t have a clue what they’re trying to do, to be honest. Every design team that worked on one or more zones has publicly described the experience of being used and abused by the political shits as the worst, and least competent, of their entire professional lives. And most are still owed money.
Next problem: the people supposedly ‘running’ the Dome - more politicians and assorted bureaucratic arsewipes - couldn’t organise three ducks in a row.
For the ‘grand opening’ on NY Eve last year, they had the spiffing idea of inviting loads of celebs, media people and senior figures such as PM Tony Bliar (spelling intentional) and Brenda (Brit term for HM the Queen) (don’t ask). Unfortunately, they forgot] to send out the invitations and tickets. I am not making this up. So all these ‘great and good’ had to wait in line on a freezing cold New Year’s Eve to collect their tickets from Stratford station.
Wait, it gets better… this NY Eve launch was a big security operation, what with so many supposedly important people attending. So everyone had to be subjected to ‘airport’ style metal sweeps and security checks. And they provided just ONE checkpoint. Again, I am not making this up. All the guests, all 10,000 of them, had to pass through this one checkpoint gate.
Anyway, many were kept waiting for hours and hours before they got to the damn thing. Some nearly missed midnight, and some just gave up on the waiting and went home in disgust. Many of these people were writers, reporters, journalists, editors and broadcasters. Most of them got their ‘revenge’ by splashing ‘what a load of crap’ stories all over the media during early January. This didn’t do much to foster public desire to traipse down to Greenwich and shell out a lot of money for the poor content on offer within.
The people who did bother to go were, on the whole, under-whelmed. There were massive queues (lines) for all the main zones (up to two hours of waiting) and people were not, in general, impressed with what they saw when they got in.
So the Dome suffered a deluge of bad PR which it richly deserved, and the public in general just decided it was a waste of space, which it is, and stayed away. This meant revenue was way down on target, so it ran out of money, so the arsewipes kept going back to the government for more public money to keep it going. Each time, they said ‘this is the last money we’ll need’, and each time they ended up breaking their word and going back for more.
The government, meanwhile, kept telling us it’s not really coming out of public money - most of the funding came from the National Lottery, some of the money will be reclaimed when the site is sold after 2000, blah blah blah. This is all typical politico smoke and mirrors. The British public have given well over £750 million pounds of their money without being asked to something most feel is just a monumentally stupid waste of space.
It’s also rather sickening the way the arsewipes keep fudging the facts. They initially decided they could get 12 million visitors in 12 months (even though all the experts told them the max realistic figure was closer to 6-8). They revised this down to 6.5 . Then down to about 5. They now claim ‘we hit the attendance target’ of about 5 million. Yeah, but 1 million of these were school kids given free tickets. And besides, no-one has verified the figures, so they could be a load of bunny raisins for all we know.
At the risk of over-simplification, and without undue bitterness, most of modern life in England is like this.
That’s all!