(Brown)Fields of Dreams, Dome of Nightmares
(X-post from LinkedIn newlsetter, January 8, 2025)
It’s 25 years since the UK’s Millennium spending splurge on cultural infrastructure. I have two stories for your inspiration from my time working at a museum design agency that I’ve never seen written before. The first is about an egregious lie, upheld by the most reputable ‘suits’, that was (counterintuitively) exactly the right thing to do. The second is about stepping aside — I watched industry leaders walk away from the highest profile project because of values conflicts.
The Big Lie that left a rich legacy
The 1993 National Lottery etc. Act set up the Millennium Commission to distribute funds to community projects to ‘mark the Millennium’. The vast majority of these were science/nature projects across the country.
Each project sprang from some strong local leader with connections, but making an idea into a reality needed architecture, design, implementation planning and a business case. And all against the clock.
In late 1995, newly seated in my first grown-up job, I was tasked with one of these. MET Studio were commissioned to support the development of the ideas for Bristol 2000 — comprising a hands-on science centre and an ‘electronic zoo’ blending screens and live animals.
I worked on what we would now call experience design and in the process became involved in the business case; I worked with the tourism experts from what we’d now call a Big Four Consultancy on the commercial modelling. The key requirement was for the project to be self-sufficient; requiring no further government support beyond the initial capital. We created scenarios for visitation, dwell times, opening hours and so on, and they modelling gift shop profits, ticket prices and so on. And one clear assumption, stated upfront in their report was … HERE IS THE BIG LIE:
There is no similar attraction existing or planned within 200 miles.
The museum design world is small. We all knew about everyone else’s project. And going through the same process was a science centre called Techniquest in Cardiff; door to door, that’s a 43 mile (70km) drive. The commercial consultants knew this. The clients new this. So did the Millenium Commission. But both projects were eventually funded and built. despite their business cases being built on an absolute lie. Everybody knew they wouldn’t be self-sufficient.
If you build it they will come
Once open, they were successful for a while. And then faced challenges of operational funding. Their leadership did all the things you’d expect. Cost cutting, fundraising, little compromises on the mission with a purely commercial event, merchandising, a couple of takehovers by commercial operators. But they survived.
The science centre ditched its dated millennial name of @Bristol, and We The Curious is now a thriving hub for science and enquiry within Bristol’s community. The “electronic zoo” morphed into Bristol Aquarium, and Techniquest is an anchor of Cardiff’s cultural infrastructure.
They would not have happened without the collusion in ignorance. We all know that there are almost zero cultural attractions that are both solely for public benefit and be financially sustainable.
So it’s OK to lie?
Why no inquiry? There were rocky moments of financial bail-outs and mission compromises in the years that followed, they were ripe for investigation.
- The projects met a genuine need. Local education, tourism, and jobs all built a social licence that made critique of the investment program as a whole nigh-on impossible.
- The costs were relatively low — all of them together amounted to £2 billion — which is less than 8% of the annual budget of the UK’s armed forces
- The long-term benefits were huge, for example incremental uplifts in science literacy at a population level. This was known and believed in across all colour of politics
- Nearly all of them were re-use of industrial wastelands. @Bristol was a heritage-listed derelict railway shed (nerdy me loved the first site visit, stepping over engine detritus amongst the smell of oil)
Looking back, this was cultural leadership of an ecosystem. The industry of ‘make valuable public infrastructure’ knew the net good that would be done, and lightly gamed the system to do it. I think every one of us now would happily do it again.
Walking away from the Big Dome
The commercially-driven Business Park planned on the Greenwich Peninsula in the early 1990s morphed into a politically-driven celebration of the Millenium — to unite the country in a “Festival of Britain 2.0”. It’s a fascinating story of hubris and failure, but I’ve never seen this bit told publicly.
With the incoming Blair government putting the project into overdrive in 1997 with the dome underway, the government department responsible created a Procurement Plan for the insides.
They asked for submissions from design consultancies. The brief barely ran to ten pages, giving broad themes (“Work”, “Play”) to the 12 zones and describing some sort of central daily show. For my non-sector readers, a great experience is built from a lot more than ten-page brief, let alone ten pages for TWELVE of them.
MET Studio’s MD was Alex McCuaig, child of Glasgow and a fierce proponent of the idea that good design improves lives. He’d built MET Studio into one of the most significant international museum and experience design consultancies.
He took a look at the brief and was not impressed. Most importantly, the brief didn’t answer the question why? and the story outlines were trite beyond belief. Next, there was no sense of a client — a body of experts how would brief, review, manage and deliver the design. No project manager, no creative director, no curator, no experience developer. (Imagine asking for a multi-million dollar project design submission while having no internal team, no managers and no CEO!)
Alex was already sceptical of the project, but then the procurement process was the final straw. The work was split into four packages, each with a tender list of 3–4 firms. So far so normal: compete for the work with some peers. But it was stacked. Each of the four lists contained one superstar international firm and the rest were barely 2 years old.
So while the government’s public statement was ‘get the best UK creatives’, the process was intentionally weighted to make it easy to select four (creative, experienced but) safe choices.
He called the MD of his main rival. Then the other two. And collectively (I remember it as happening within the morning?) they all refused to submit proposals. The joint letter back to the procurement people mentioned all of the above reasons, and I remember Alex explaining his decision, adding that the design heroes he’d had in his twenties worked to elevate emerging talent, not shut it out.
The consequences of that decision were massive. For Alex’s company, he focused on projects that were either nothing to do with the Millennium or were outside London/UK. For the UK exhibition design sector, it prompted an upswelling of talent — so many designers an fabricators cut their teeth on the Dome and regardless of the underlying paucity of purpose, the sector was set up with more talent than it could use for the next twenty years.
As a visitor attraction, though, it failed. It lost money, barely getting half its visitors and became a standing joke in the exhibition and tourism sector. I’d argue its biggest success was the architecture getting into a Bond film. It is weird to me now that it is a design inspiration for many millennials, who see it as a pinnacle of 90s design style, just pre-digital
What stands out to me now is the commercial courage behind the convictions of Alex and his sector colleagues. He was comfortable to let the company miss out on a large, guaranteed revenue stream for three years: he could have bought out or hired some of that young talent and taken the profit into his company. The project wouldn’t create excellence, so he walked away.
Lessons for Leaders
This newsletter is intended as relating to applying strategy. So to conclude what would I draw as lessons from all this?
- Purpose doesn’t come from politics. There was demand from communities for regional attractions, there was zero demand for a year-long Festival of Nothing in a Big Dome. Don’t build your purpose on anything but genuine demand from real people.
- Take the value, not the money. 25 years later, it’s what I respect Alex for the most.
- I wrote a while back about strategy sometimes being furtive. I think delivering community-changing projects by piggybacking on something not truly related (the creation of Auckland Museum and War Memorial is another great example) is a great example of furtive strategy; the culture knows what is happening and collectively just goes with it.
- If you want to change something, move upstream; and the furthest upstream is culture. The government’s money and authority could not force Alex to work against his values, nor make a bunch of consultants value the running costs in four years time more than building a great community asset. Strategic intent must follow the grain of the culture.
- Sometimes your rivals are your allies. Alex fought for projects with these other companies. He was happy to win one, grumpy to lose out to one of them. But ultimately they were all in the same business: design excellence for public purpose. And putting aside rivalry to stand for quality was not even a difficult choice.
- Know when to stand aside. No-one wants ‘Megalomaniac who squashed young rivals” written in their obituary, and the furtherance of any profession comes from established leaders handing over the reins and allows others the opportunity to grow into the vacated space.
Fin
This was a slightly indulgent reminiscence of a newsletter, following some summer downtime and this memory from 31 Dec 1999:
25 years ago, Claire and I stood in the tidal mud of the Thames and toasted the millennium. After vowing to stay at home, we said “f*ck it” and headed out about 10.30. Last train into Victoria. Hundreds of us, not a ticket to show. They opened the barriers, we cheered and flooded through. On the Thames as the “river of fire” sputtered past in the seconds after midnight. Popped the champagne and swigged from the bottle. Shared it with a homeless dude who insisted we swig from his bottle of Archers. Dodgy night bus then a 5 mile walk home. Great night.
I’m very privileged to have worked with Alex, and with architects like Chris Wilkinson and Michael Hopkins, in the heyday of Bri’ish museum design.
Back to the current times — with less self-indulgence — next bi-week.
Happy New Year everyone, and may the wind be at your back throughout 2025.
Paul
