BOOKS

Talking 'bout regeneration

Bevis Hillier

REGENERATION: THE STORY OF THE DOME by Adam Nicolson HarperCollins, £19.99, pp. 255 THE MILLENNIUM DOME by Elizabeth Wilhide HarperCollins Illustrated, £19.99, pp. 192 SORRY MENISCUS: EXCURSIONS TO THE MILLENNIUM DOME by Iain Sinclair Profile Books, £3.99, pp. 91 Iam essentially a townie. I love the coun- try, but if I stay there too long I begin to miss the London libraries, also hotel bars where they know how to mix a decent mar- garita. Wild horses might drag me into enjoying country life = if they were not part of the problem rather than the solu- tion. It takes a lot to interest me in silage or treating cows for ringworm; but Adam Nicolson manages it in his weekly Sunday Telegraph Magazine column, 'Perch Hill', about his farm in the Sussex Weald. He is a writer not just in the tradition of Richard Jefferies and W. H. Hudson, but in their class.

His book, Perch Hill, published in 1999, is elegiac, wise and often very funny — the usual Nicolson fare. But a passage on page 82 brought me up short. After quoting Kipling's poem 'The Way through the Woods', Nicolson writes:

That is still there too: the numinous haze above the leaf-litter on the wood floor; the moss-walled trenches of the old lanes drop- ping to the river where the shallow gravel turns it into fords; the black pools over which the willows and alders curve their long, flexed limbs like the struts of a tented dome...

Hang on a moment, I thought. 'Like the struts of a tented dome'. The phrase has the same beginning and the same metrical cadence as a line from The Lost Chord 'Like the sound of a great amen'. But what it even more evokes is our own dear Dome, with its scarecrow struts and giant mem- brane. Had not Stephen Bayley, its one- time creative director, insisted — as though it were a recommendation — that it was a tent? Knowing, as we now know, that Nicolson's next book was to be about the Dome, we might wonder whether the line about the alders was a Freudian slip. Or was it a deliberate plant, like the premoni- tory warble of the clarinets, in a symphony, that heralds the approach of a grand theme?

In such anniversary years as 2025, 2100 and (if mankind survives that long) 3000, historians and journalists will look back and ask what we did to mark 2000. Nicolson's admirable book will be a good starting-point for their researches. He is level-headed, if not always even-handed. He marshals a lot of complicated material very well. While he does not get bogged down in statistics, he does have to address them. The subject gives him little scope for the atmospheric writing in which he excels, though the narrative is constantly enlivened by his gift for the vivid or witty phrase. The Dome is 'a sunshade for an entire seaside resort'. It 'touches the ground with no more than its finger-tips'. The original pol- luted site in Greenwich 'looked like the aftermath of some terrible nuclear acci- dent'. A diagram of the supervision system for the Dome was 'like the nervous system of a lobster'. Jennie Page, the formidable head of the New Millennium Experience Company (NMEC), has 'the quality which in an earlier age was called "bottom" '. That's Nicolson for you: you always want to get to the bottom of the Page. (The Dome somehow provokes bad puns. An Indian restaurant there has been nicknamed The Poppadome' and the vast embracing couple in the Body Zone are Domeo and Juliet'.) Nicolson's book bears the official millen- nium logo — described by Michael Hesel- tine as having 'a small head' and by Stephen Bayley as 'a kitsch, pseudo-Cretan, steroid-pumped bronze female figure'. (She cost the NMEC £90,000 and was found to have an embarrassing resem- blance to a figure designed for Roche the chemicals firm.) The deal was, Nicolson could have limited access to the documents and talk to whoever would talk to him. Only two of the Millennium Commission- ers would — Heseltine and Simon Jenkins, who get star treatment. While the NMEC was to have no veto over what he wrote, they could correct 'errors of fact'. Nicolson writes, have had some heavy encounters with Jennie Page . . . The definition of a "fact" is not always as easy as one might imagine.' I bet. When an extract appeared in the Sunday Telegraph Magazine, it was billed on the cover as 'Dome Wars'. Given a totally free hand, that is possibly the title Nicolson might have chosen, since, as every journalist knows, people are always more interested in things going wrong than things going right. As it is, he does not dis- guise the frequent patches of aggro, but one suspects some of the hairier moments have been given a trim.

In a chapter headed 'Roots of the Idea', Nicolson claims as the fons et origo, the first public suggestion, of the millennium cele- brations plan a letter of mine published in the Times in March 1989. The letter was sent by Mrs Thatcher to her arts minister, Richard Luce, but he ruled that it was `rather too early to start thinking about these things'. Nicolson rightly says that I was angling for the post of director-general of a Festival 2000; but that was not my only motive. My idea was that 2000 gave the chance for stock-taking and a new start. The line that simmered in my mind was Shelley's The world's great age begins anew.' I can't help thinking that that would have made, a more inspiring slogan than the one devised by Saatchi — 'It's time to make a difference.' As the journalist Rowan Moore wrote, that would have been as 'boring as the local election slogan of the Liberal party in 1974'. Throughout his book, Nicolson insists that hope and a desire for regeneration were the motive forces for the Dome.

Nothing really got going until 1994, when the Millennium Commission was appoint- ed. This terribly late start bedevilled every- thing that followed. There should have been an international competition to find an architect, ideally after some notion of what was to go in the building had been worked out. Instead, Richard Rogers got the commission — as far as one can gather, because he happened to be doing work at Greenwich at the time. Was he necessarily the right choice? It is not a question that Nicolson asks; but it is worth noting Diane Ghirardo's acid comment about a not incomparable building, the Pompidou Cen- tre, Paris (by Rogers and Renzo Piano, 1972-77) in her Architecture after Mod- ernism (1996):

Piano and Rogers emphasised the warehouse type as an artefact of high technology but especially as a historically neutral container for culture of various levels. Unfortunately, they did not consider the consequences of such mundane matters as maintenance, and visitors have watched bemused over the years as dirt accumulated in unreachable corners, corroding the exuberant technological display . . . Rarely has so much uninteresting infor- mation been communicated on a façade with such chromatic aggressiveness.

By contrast with his tenderness towards Rogers's Dome, Nicolson is harsh on Stephen Bayley. Certainly, Bayley can be bumptious and tactless, but he has a lot of experience in the design world and the right sort of brio and panache for a festival adviser. In the summer of 1997, when the Mind Zone was being planned, he was sug- gesting that the NMEC should pause for six months, get people who knew about the mind to write an account of what matters about the mind, give it to somebody (like himself) who knew about exhibitions to write an exhibition brief, then pass it to a designer. That would have been perfectly sound thinking in 1990, but by 1997 there just wasn't time for such a process. Design- ers were being commissioned direct. It was in just that way that the designer Eva Jiric- na, asked to design a zone about 'Soul' (later, 'Spirit Level', later still, 'Faith Zone'), blithely went ahead and designed a `New Age' pyramid, which predictably out- raged not only Christians, who understand- ably felt the millennium had something to do with the birth of Christ, but also other faiths which wanted to be represented.

Again, this sort of solecism could have been avoided if a church leader had been appointed to the Millennium Commission in 1994. Conor Cruise O'Brien commented severely on this omission in his 1994 lec- tures published as On the Eve of the Millen- nium. (It is, by the way, a failing of all the books under review that they do not refer to the incunabula of the millennium, including Italo Calvino's prescient Six Memos for the Next Millennium, 1988; Felipe Fernandez-Armesto's Millennium, 1995; Harold Bloom's Omens of Millenni- um, 1996; Damian Thompson's The End of Time, 1996; Fins de Siecle: How Centuries End, edited by Asa Briggs and Daniel Snowman, 1996; Stephen Jay Gould's Questioning the Millennium, 1997; Elaine Showalter's Hystories, 1997; and Marina Benjamin's Living at the End of the World, 1997, to say nothing of Tricky's record Pre- Millennium Tension, a variant of a phrase first coined by the advertising mogul Win- ston Fletcher.) Elizabeth Wilhide's book, which, like Nicolson's, bears the NMEC seal of approval, is two things. First, it is an extremely well-written public relations handout about the Dome. I am sure Wil- hide had fewer battles of will with Jennie Page than did Nicolson. Only on five occa- sions does she allow any hint of aggro to show through, each time dismissing it as succinctly and smoothly as possible. A multinational corporation in need of a head of PR would do well to consider Wil- hide. That does not mean that if I see her name on the front of a book I shall race to buy it. But where her book really scores is in its fine illustrations. The sections of the struts look like works by Sir Anthony Caro. I have never been a fan of Caro's girder- like 'sculptures'. Giving him a knighthood was rather like honouring somebody for being good at Meccano. But at least the bits of the Dome have the integrity of something with a purpose, even if Iain Sin- clair can write sourly, 'The great yellow struts on which the Dome will be erected are lying on their sides like decommissioned ordnance.'

The diatribe — every line a poisoned arrow — is a literary form that has fallen into disuse. In Sorry Meniscus, Sinclair most exhilaratingly revives it. In a literary Olympics he would get a gold medal for invective-hurling (make that 'throwing the Meniscus'). If he had lived in the 18th cen- tury, government and opposition would both have been offering him good money to write squibs about their enemies. Part of his booklet is manifestly unfair: that in which he moans about the difficulties of getting to the Dome at a time when not just the Dome but various transport links to it were under construction (though even here he may have the last laugh — for example, if there are constant delays on the new Jublilee Line extension). Apart from that, he is unbeatable for on-target vicious- ness. By the end of the booklet you almost begin to feel sympathy for his victims. At intervals he finds new and ever more malevolent ways of describing the Dome. It is 'meaningless and magnificent, a pale intruder on the downriver mud' . 'a blob of congealed correction fluid, a flick of Tipp-Ex to revise the mistakes of 19th- century industrialists' . . . 'a poached egg designed by a committee of vegans'. He excoriates its temporary nature (sure as hell it is not going to be around in 3000) and its lack of originality:

It was a quotation from the Festival of Britain, the 'Dome of Discovery', tricked out with bright (Wan Gogh cornfield') yellow cocktail sticks.

Sinclair is perhaps rather too fond of sentences without verbs CA caul of translu- cent skin. A Blakean conceit, fierce, true, but held only in the mind. . . An instant of good will, a breath, a caesura between cen- turies. . .') But for the most part the co- author of Rodinsky's Room has command of a full-bodied prose style which veers from the richly evocative to the bitingly satirical. This is how he conveys the 'karma' of the 'sinister wasteland' on which the Dome was to stand:

The Molochs in workers' cottages and bur- rows, whom the rest of Greenwich refused to acknowledge, mutated as they came to terms with the by-products of the gas industry: coal gas, tar, sulphate of ammonia; the trains, the phenol, the never-ending noise (grinding, thumping, whistling, clanging). Here were the ancient fragrances of the soap works; bone-crushers, whale-rendering boil- ers. Manufacturers of artificial manure steamed their cauldrons of salvaged leather, sugar-waste and bone-ash. Droplets of sulphuric acid fed the surviving cabbage patches.

`Dome wets' will relish Sinclair's barbs and brickbats:

The chemically enhanced skin of the Dome was tight as a repeat-order facelift.

Give us the bread and we'll give you the cir- cuses.

Berlin in the Thirties, without Leni Riefen- stahl.

On 9 April 1996 the Evening Standard reported Imagination's plans for 'a sundial taller than Nelson's Column' as centrepiece for the Millennium Exhibition. Six months later the plan was abandoned in favour of a giant Dome.

Clap sores revamped as beauty spots. Terrible ghosts were trapped in the ground.

Bemused civilians, badgered into celebration and rehearsed spontaneity, being shepherded through zones sponsored by multinational pirates.

Perhaps best of all is Sinclair's fantasy that the Dome was a clever snare set by the Tories for the incoming Labour govern- ment, 'a blank cheque framed in barbed wire'. He shares a final joke with us. He was first permitted to visit the Dome in 1997 as a writer for the London Review of Books. He later learned that the only rea- son he had been allowed in was that the millennium people misheard and thought he was from the London Review of Bricks. Shades of Scoop.

Because of my early thwarted attempt to get planning for the millennium under way, I have kept a beady eye on all that has hap- pened since 1989. Along the way, I have been very critical. But I approached these books with an open mind; and to some extent Nicolson and Wilhide have changed it. You have to take your hard hat off to Jennie Page. It was not her decision that preparations should begin five years late in a disused gasworks. She offers this well- turned justification of the Dome's ad- hocism:

When doing something like this, you cannot tell what the deep and underlying reasons are. Perhaps, in retrospect, we will be able to see. For the present, it is impossible to say. You cannot analyse the movement of every muscle you make as you play a tennis shot or if you hit a snooker ball. If you did, if you attempted to, you wouldn't be able to make the shot. You would be paralysed by self-consciousness.

Putting my money where my mouth is, I have bought two Dome tickets for mid- January — by which time I hope any glitch- es may have been ironed out. After all the bad-mouthing I have done, will there be something akin to Lord Rochester's deathbed conversion? Sinclair is as sardon- ic and unyielding as ever on the 'How I stopped worrying and learned to love the Dome' scenario.

Miltonic curmudgeons will be painlessly sub- orned by superior plonk, freebies and unlim- ited space in the broadsheets. I was prepared for the Dr Who experience, finding the laws of time and space in suspension, beauty locked beneath an unpromising carapace. But, in reality, the building site was every- thing I anticipated: all the excitement of a slightly dirty circus tent . . .

Whether or not the Dome's contents wow me, I am glad that some grand symbol was created to mark the elision of millen- nia. I would have preferred a different edi- fice on a different site, but as the Dome was the only game in town I think Tony Blair was right not to 'dump' it, as at one stage the Sun was raucously advising him to do. The world's great age begins anew. Even Peter Conrad, the least dewy-eyed of writ- ers, suggested in a recent review of a book on the Renaissance that our wearied civili- sation could do with another renaissance. Thanks to our educators' busily phasing Greek and Latin from the school syllabus- es, it is unlikely to spring from the 'classical countries', like the last one. Chiming with the title of one of Carlyle's wackiest books, Sartor Resartus, we can only supplicate: `Starter, restart us.'

How the controversial `Body Zone' was planned in February 1998. The final version is quite different (Evening Standard).