Latest news with #MillenniumDome
The Sun
a day ago
- Business
- The Sun
EFL stadium kitted out with £7m of equipment from the Millennium Dome with kids' play area turned into training centre
AN EFL stadium is packed to the Gills with trinkets from the Millennium Dome. Priestfield Stadium has been home to Gillingham since the club's formation in 1893. 3 3 3 Former Gills chairman Paul Scally grabbed a selection of bargains after the infamous London project was phased out in 2001. The government auctioned off thousands of items following the Dome's demise. Scally - who bought Gillingham for £1 in 1995 - spotted an opportunity. And the 69-year-old got carried away with his bidding at the auction 23 years ago. Scally estimates the club received up to £7million worth of equipment after shelling out just £750,000. The purchases helped Gillingham refurbish a new Priestfields stand at a knock-down price. While the club megastore boasted £250,000 of fittings bought for just £5,000. Scally explained to Sky Sports: "It was a case of being in the right place at the right time. "I've bought tea trolleys, ovens, fire extinguishers, 300 sets of bone china, glasses and all sorts on top of the bigger stuff. "This has allowed us to move the club forward quicker than I had envisaged. We just kept going back to the site for more gear. Abandoned EFL stadium left to rot with pitch covered in weeds just five years after hosting final match "I bought a seven-and-a-half ton lorry to transport everything and we must have made 100 trips to Greenwich. "I've had to borrow a 10,000 sq ft warehouse off a mate because there isn't enough room at the ground for everything." Scally also managed to get his hands on a new indoor training centre. Valued at £1.5million, the Gills chairman converted an 80m x 40m play area from the Dome for just £70,000. Scally gained control of the club in 1995 for a nominal fee of £1, but also took on its £1.5m debt. He sold his controlling stake to US property magnate Brad Galinson in December 2022, while continuing as a non-executive director. Scally was voted off the club's board last year. Gillingham are currently in League Two, having bounced around the third and four tiers for the past two decades. They spent five seasons in the Championship from 2000, but have not returned since relegation in 2005.
Times
16-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
The ‘end of history' was the source of our ills
All the best scenes in Shifty, Adam Curtis's new documentary about Britain in the late 20th-century, concern the Millennium Dome. With skilfully spliced footage of its gaping interiors and weirdly looming riverside bulk, the dome is transformed into an almost gothic symbol of fin de siècle spiritual vacuousness. A planning committee decides that it is to have a 'spirit zone', but nobody can decide what religions should be represented there. In a drab conference room a man with an uninspiring powerpoint enthuses that the phrase 'HOW SHALL I LIVE?' should be projected onto a blank wall instead. Isn't that a bit 'banal', wonders Simon Jenkins. He is quickly shouted down. You don't have to buy all of Curtis's arguments — was Margaret Thatcher really the sole author of modern hyperindividualism? — to appreciate his refreshingly eerie and desolate portrait of that much-mythologised period, the 'end of history'. To many today, the late 1990s and early 2000s are a lost Edwardian summer of stability and peace. The endless trend pieces about 'Nineties nostalgia' are more than mere fluff. The undying popularity of Friends, Harry Potter and Bridget Jones among those not alive to see them first time round, and the lucrative resurrections of Oasis and Pulp, represent something real. For people my age and younger, the vanished era of post-Cold War tranquillity is as psychologically significant as the Second World War was to some baby boomers; it is the same painful sense of having just missed a glorious cresting wave in the tide of history. But rather than envying the heroism of our fathers, we covet their low house prices and political stability. To many Gen Zers (almost half of whom tell pollsters they wish TikTok didn't exist) the last years before iPhones have an archaic charm. Apparently banal clips of Noughties life acquire viral currency as artefacts of an innocent time before digital corruptions — the latest TikTok phenomenon is footage of the band MGMT performing dorkily at Yale to a conspicuously non-smartphone waving audience. According to the popular story, a series of earthquakes shook us out of paradise: 9/11, the 2008 crash, social media, mass migration. But as Curtis shows, our unhappy age is a natural evolution of, not an aberration from the 1990s. History doesn't rupture, it mutates. The myth of the blissful end of history is just as bogus as the myth of the long Edwardian summer (in the years before the First World War, readers will recall, Britain was on the brink of civil war over the question of Home Rule for Ireland). The seeds of our present discontent were already germinating in that lost Eden at the end of history. The world Curtis portrays in Shifty is quite spookily familiar. The sleazy politicians of John Major's decaying government (the Starmer administration fleetingly strikes the viewer as almost attractive) have lost both public trust and the capacity to direct events. In the furious eyes of miners filing grimly out of shuttered pits in County Durham you glimpse the first sparks of the populist conflagration soon to engulf western democracies (and, perhaps, a foreshadowing of the AI-driven white collar deindustrialisation to come). Above it all, the unaccountable barons of high finance perch in their glittering silver towers. Off screen in America, political polarisation was already carving ideological rifts down Thanksgiving tables. Newt Gingrich had long since resolved that politics was a 'war for power' and embarked on his attritional battles over the budget with Bill Clinton. The scandal over Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky and the Republicans' subsequent impeachment campaign split the country with almost Trump-era vitriol. In elite universities a movement known as 'political correctness' was campaigning to jettison pale stale writers from the canon, prompting one of the great public intellectuals of the age, Robert Hughes, to warn against the politicisation of art and a burgeoning cult of 'victimhood'. There were no smartphones, true. But the advent of 24-hour news represented a media revolution nearly as important. One of the most effectively jarring moments in Curtis's series juxtaposes the hectic, adrenalised tone of 1990s TV news with a clip showing the staid formality of the BBC in the 1960s. The contrast is almost as stark as that which divides Newsnight from TikTok. By the 1990s, television was fragmenting into an infinity of cable news channels. Anybody who has read Neil Postman's polemic Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985) knows that his criticisms of TV — its inanity, its lack of deep context, its weird juxtapositions of the trivial and the serious — precisely anticipate the smartphone. Screens were already isolating us in the 1990s. Curtis supplies tragicomic footage of an elderly couple sitting side by side in morose silence, hypnotised by a documentary about turtles. Membership of clubs and churches declined, and television was rated the most popular leisure activity. The five hours a day the average person dedicated to TV in 1990 seems restrained compared with the virtually constant smartphone use that characterises many modern lives, but it's also hard to argue that it represents the quasi-Amish technological continence of Gen Z mythology. Though the romanticisation of the 1990s is not exactly baseless — I would rather live in an age before inflated house prices and the automation of the written word — it is overdone. The crises of the present age have helped expose a cultural and spiritual hollowness that was already evident at the turn of the millennium. Perhaps a country that chose to celebrate itself by constructing a huge and vacant white space was always going to end up in trouble
Times
14-05-2025
- Business
- Times
A new London arena could help with 2040 Olympic bid
The man who masterminded the Millennium Dome's transition into the O2 has told The Times he would love to build another arena in the city — and hopes a new venue could help in London's efforts to secure another Olympic Games. 'When you look at London,' said Tim Leiweke, the chief executive of Oak View Group, 'you're comparing with New York and Los Angeles — and they've got four arenas each. 'London is the biggest and best music market in the world. London's a big city.' Leiweke, who was born in St Louis, Missouri, was chief executive of the entertainment giant AEG from 1996 to 2013 and oversaw the company's overhaul of the Dome in Greenwich into what he now describes as the most successful
Daily Mail
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
The Diamond Heist: Trailer, certificate and where to watch
Guy Ritchie-produced documentary series about the attempt to steal one of the world's largest diamonds from the Millennium Dome Year: 2025
Time Out
05-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Out
4 legendary London attractions turning 25 in 2025
Picture the scene. It's 1999, and the government has just spent £789 million building a giant dome-shaped building in southeast London. But what promised to be a turn-of-the-millennium world-class exhibition venue, ended up a bit of a dud. We're of course talking about the infamous Millennium Dome – now the O2 Arena – which turns 25 this year. The Dome was one of four major attractions that opened in London to mark the year 2000. Twenty-five years on, we look back at the iconic landmarks that arrived in the capital to herald in a new millennium. Millennium Dome Ah, 2000. It was a simpler time. There were no Lime bikes, or street vox-poppers, and barely any small plates restaurants. Perhaps one of the biggest scandals of the era was the misfortunate Millennium Dome, which opened on New Year's Eve 1999. After its bizarre opening exhibition, which offered an immersive human body experience, circus performers and a cinema, the dome eventually became the O2 as we know it today. Millennium Bridge The once wobbly bridge had to close immediately after opening when it was revealed it couldn't hold the weight of all the people crossing it. It's all fixed now, and is currently in the midst of a (delayed) £3.5 million makeover. Back in 2000 the London Eye was actually called the Millennium Wheel, and was the world's biggest ferris wheel. It was only meant to be temporary, but in May 2024 it officially became a permanent attraction. Phew! Tate Modern We're not sure where Londoners went to see modern art in London before the arrival of this behemoth in an old power station. The Tate Modern opened its doors to the public on May, 12, 2000. Second gallery the Switch House came later, arriving in 2016.
