25 years on: The best and worst of Britain’s Millennium architecture

It’s hard for anyone who was not then alive to know how full the 1990s were with hope. Britain’s economic decline had reversed. Martial prowess had been rediscovered in the Falklands War. Communism had failed. Investment was inward. Wallets had more money in them. The long shadow of industrial decline was brightening with new jobs in shopping malls, distribution hubs and call centres.

After harsh medicine under the Tories, the country even had the confidence to vote for Labour and smiley Tony Blair, who would lavish the largesse of economic growth upon the people. The Millennium was coming. And John Major’s voluntary tax fund, known as the National Lottery, was marshalling resources for a storm of Millennium-related expenditure. It was going to be fun.

One quarter of a century on, where are we now? What has happened to the Millennium projects?

It is rare for a national moment to generate edifices whose original intent endures in the public consciousness. The 1851 Great Exhibition created the Crystal Palace, until it burnt down. Queen Victoria’s 1897 Diamond Jubilee incited a bazaar of Jubilee clock towers, fountains, civic halls and statues across the empire. Most still stand, gathering moss, but few are noticed. Their celebratory origins are forgotten. Only the Royal Festival Hall remains from the 1951 Festival of Britain, though its original façade was peeled off and lost in a 1964 reconstruction.

The 1918 Armistice is the only moment whose architectural consequences are still part of contemporary Britain. Only a handful of British parishes (the 53 so-termed Thankful Villages) lost none of their sons to the First World War’s slaughter. Every other village, suburb, town and neighbourhood across the land has a war memorial whose prominent location, design and sacerdotal purpose is still widely understood and even sanctified by prayer once a year.

How do the Millennium projects measure in comparison? Which did best? Which are duds? The most successful are the curvaceous, the natural and those which serve the citizenry’s everyday needs. The least successful are the pompous, the aggressively architectural (Millennium Modern, anyone?) or those which attempted to effect a regenerative transformation beyond their capabilities.

The Eden Project

Cornwall’s Eden Project caught the Millennium’s environment-embracing zeitgeist best. Its nature-packed domes, or biomes, are colonial Martian pods outside (has Elon Musk visited?) and immersive celebrations of gardens and rainforest inside. “High tech” meets “tree hugger”. A million visited every year, contributing a billion pounds to Cornwall’s economy. No Millennium project has had such benign regional consequences. It is being emulated from Dundee to China. But will it weather current economic challenges? It has just announced job cuts due to rising costs.

• Rating: 9/10

The Millennium Bridge

The second-most positive Millennium contribution to modern Britain was once the most mocked. London’s Millennium Bridge is splendidly located, linking the South Bank to the City. It creates a perfect urban vista to St Paul’s divine dome. Around 80,000 people cross every day. By helping us get about the city, it regenerates, enriches and revives. It’s not my normal cup of architectural tea, but the clean and sheeny low-cut metal bridge is rather splendid against St Paul’s, like an Aston Martin in a Baroque town square.

The Millennium Bridge uniquely engendered a scientific discovery: synchronous lateral excitation whereby the instinctive sway of people crossing a bridge creates sideways oscillations, encouraging those crossing to sway in step, which in turn increases the oscillations. This is why, to much ribaldry, the bridge initially wobbled, until dampeners were added.

• Rating: 8/10 (Would be more without the early wobble)

Tate Modern

This forms the southern end of the Millennium Bridge’s new path to St Paul’s. Unlike Battersea Power Station, the Tate was able to regenerate Giles Gilbert Scott’s brick beauty without ruining the surrounding neighbourhood with elephantine architectural excrescence. I was lucky enough to visit before they cluttered it up with modern art. It was intoxicating, the bizarre love child of steam-powered Britain and Pharaonic Egypt. It’s a shame about the junk inside. But tourists flock.

• Rating: 7/10

The London Eye

I want to dislike the London Eye but cannot. It is tawdry. It infests the South Bank with a pottage of tourists. It interposes utilitarian vulgarity between the sublime Palace of Westminster and steadfast County Hall. And yet I revel in its Top of the Pops cheeriness. It is London not being too pompous. It passes the Eiffel Tower test of being instantly recognisable and is now on Tube seat upholstery. The God-like view from the top is a “here is one I made earlier” answer to the “what to do with visiting foreigners” question. Buy tickets online first to scythe the queues.

• Rating: 7/10

The Millennium Dome

London’s Millennium Dome is less happy. It was obscene to celebrate a Millennium with a lightweight PVC tent designed to last 25 years. Throwaway architecture to fete a throwaway age. The initial “Millenium Experience” was awful. I visited and recall only the ennui. Against the odds, the Dome has survived – though a storm ripped off six segments in 2022. It has metastasised into a successful sports and music venue, the O2, which is more than the 1951’s Dome of Discovery achieved. The wide, low and pale Thames Estuary needed a building which was not wide, low and pale.

• Rating: 5/10. Points awarded for surviving and for happy punters.

The National Centre for Popular Music

The upturned cauldrons that were Sheffield’s National Centre for Popular Music might have been fun in a different location but were classically millennial in their arrogant contempt for surrounding historic streets. The museum failed within a year and the cauldrons have since housed a students’ union, until the union decided to vacate. The future is uncertain and demolition is, apparently, a possibility.

• Rating: 4/10. Points for chutzpah.

The Deep

In a tough race, Hull’s The Deep is probably the Millennium’s ugliest concoction. Thanks to the study of neuroscience, we now understand that most of us dislike, and find unnerving, buildings that are too sharp and slicing. The Deep looks as if part of Darth Vader’s Star Destroyer has crashed to earth. There are fish inside. It has only attracted a fraction of the visitors of Cornwall’s Eden Project. I love historic Hull. It deserved better.

• Rating: 3/10

Nicholas Boys Smith is the founding chairman of Create Streets. His history of London’s streets No Free Parking is available from Bonnier books.