Dome there, done that - still stinks

In a vain attempt to find some redemption for the Millennium Dome I managed to persuade Dave to take a walk around the Greenwich Peninsular. It was a fantastically sunny day, so we felt that we had to do something "out", and I thought that it might be nice to see what they had done with the area around the Dome. Not such a good idea as it turned out. The Dome itself seems to have done absolutely nothing to contribute towards the regeneration of the area - if anything it is worse now, and it still stinks - literally. So bad you almost want to retch.

Walking along the Thames footpath around the outer circumference of the Dome is a pretty bleak, depressing and uninspiring experience. The Dome was intended to be an outwardly expressive, iconic "building", but the outside is mostly fenced-off. All you see when you walk around the perimeter are rubbish bins, vans, loading bays, crates, sheds, portaloos, stacks of various gear, general rubbish, and all sorts of other service paraphernalia. It is really sad and depressing that what what was originally a nice riverside general circulation area now resembles a trashed back alley. Even the former meridian plaza area, which I recall was quite nicely done for the original 2000 exhibition, is now just a trailer park for the cast and crew of the semi-permanent Afrika! show in it's tacky plastic tent alongside. Shame on you O2for allowing the Dome and its public spaces (both of which were paid for from public funds) to be so appalingly treated. I thought that the inside was pretty awful when we visited it last year (Blog: New tack and old chic), but this was worse.

Continuing our walk down the west side of the Greenwich Peninsular we were at least expecting to see some evidence of physical or economic regeneration - the "knock-on effect" that was the main point of building the Dome in the first place. But nothing. Just the same old decrepit and derelict industrial riverside that it was when I first walked along here 20 years ago.And some of those factories really stink. It is difficult, I know, as these places are presumably productive and provide employment, but there seems little prospect of renewal and regeneration while they continue to operate. And the millions of pounds of public money pumped into the Dome have clearly had no effect whatsoever.

It was with some relief that on contnuing on towards Greenwich proper we arrived at one of our favourite pubs (and one of Greenwich's better kept secrets) - The Cutty Sark - for a very welcome pint.

A load of old rubbish

This weekend was London's annual "Open House" event, where hundreds of public, private and commercial buildings around the city are open to the public. We usually try to use this opportunity to see buildings we wouldn't normally have access to, and this year we decided to vist somewhere close to home - a major industrial building which dominates the view from one side of our flat in Deptford.

SELCHP (South East London Combined Heat and Power) is a refuse incineration plant which generates electricity from the domestic refuse of four London boroughs (Lewisham, Greenwich, Westminster and Bromley). The plant opened in 1994, and was a major (and not uncontroversial) addition to the local skyline. Open House gave us an opportunity to look around inside and find out exactly what happems to our rubbish.

We were pretty impressed by how they handled the visitors - of which there were, perhaps surprisingly, quite a few. We were greeted at the entrance, handed a brochure and given a short safety briefing. Then it was up to us to make our way around the marked tour route at our own pace. There was no guided tour, but there were employees stationed all along who were quite happy to answer any questions.

The tour route took you past all the main processes, although not in the logical order, which might be a little confusing for some. Possibly the least impressive thing came first - the steam turbine. For something which generates enough electricity for 35,00 homes, it didn't look that big, although it's 3,000 rpm rotor certainly created a powerful hum. More impressive was the control room, with its detailed wall-mounted plant schematic, complete with dials, flow meters and digital displays now made rather redundant by a couple of LCD computer screens that the operators actually use to control the plant these days.

But the real star of this show is on one side of the control room, where two control chairs with joysticks look out through a window into the main refuse bunker. This is where the rubbish trucks dump the refuse, and from where two giant grabbers pick-up the refuse and deposit it in the hoopers that feed the furnaces. The grabbers are operated from the control chairs just like those fairground machines where you operate a pulley-controlled grabber and try to pick-up a prize from the hopper and drop it into the chute. But these grabbers are enormous! They are about 4m in diameter and can pick-up 5 tonnes at a time. Because the process is partly automated, anyone can operate the grabbers with a little supervision from the staff. You just have to use the controls on the chair to lower the grabber, point it at a part of the pile to descend to, and then tell it to close. The raising and depositing of the load in the furnace chute is automatic. The kids loved this, and there was quite a competition to get into the chairs and have a go (so we didn't bother waiting). Seeing one of these grabbers open and descending close to the control window was pretty impressive.

The other thing that impressed me was the furnace itself. Obviously, at 1,000 degrees C you can't see directly into these, but at the bottom end of the furnace (the furnace grate is angled about 25 degrees) there are small inspection hatches with a metal plate that you can lift up and look through a thick glass plate up onto the furnace grate. What you see is a fiercely hot yellow-orange inferno with a cascade of burning rubbish slowly descending towards you. Flames shooting up, and ash and embers floating down. It really was like something from a sci-fi movie.

This may not have been the most architecurally inspiring building to visit, but it was fascinating to see how it all worked, and the ingenious engineering which make is all happen. It is also good to find out exacty what happens to all the rubbish the we generate. This kind of facility is not exactly flavour of the month at the moment, and there have always been questions about the emissions that they create, but it does mean that very little of our rubbish in Lewisham is simple sent to landfill sites.

PS: Sorry, I forgot to take any picures inside the plant!

Strange Pavillions

Since I arrived a little early for my Prom concert at the Royal Albert Hall tonight I decided to go for a little wander around Hyde Park/Kensington Gardens (I am never quite sure where one ends and the other begins). The weather had started to turn a little brighter - a little more like a proper summer evening than of late - and I wanted to see what this year's summer pavillion at the Serpentine Gallery was like.

I was not much taken by last year's bloated baloon offering by Rem Koolhaas, although it certainly had scale and impact - it's huge white helium-filled dome visible from some distance towering over the classical gallery like some billious eruption. I thought it rather vulgar.

This year, the pavillion has been designed by the Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson, and is a rather more intruiging affair. Actually, it is not quite finished yet, and they still appear to be putting finishing touches to the interior, but the exterior appears to be complete. It is a helical structure of dark wood with an almost continuous open gap (instead of a wall) curving around the edge and up to the inclined conical roof. Between the upper and lower edges of the open gap there are skeins of thin white thread strung with a slight twist, which gives an interesting visual effect as you walk around the outside. The feel is almost like a place of worship - the building is substantially open, but it is difficult to make out what is happening inside. I'll be curious to take another look when it is finally open to the public.

As for tonight's Prom, that was another strange piece of architecture, although Bartok's Bluebeard's Castle is bigger, darker and altogther more disturbing the the Serpentine pavillions. But Bartok's psychological architecture uses light, colour and sound in a way which I am sure Olafur Eliasson would appreciate (Eliasson is best known in the UK for his hugely popular "Weather Project" installation at the Tate Modern in 2003, which involved a giant monochrome sodium lamp "sun" and an apparent doubling of the height of the turbine hall by mirroring the entire ceiling).

Proms 2007

First Prom of the season:

Prom No. 5
Sam Hayden: Substratum (BBC commission: world premiere)
Bernstein: Symphony No. 2, 'The Age of Anxiety'
Ives: Symphony No. 4

Rather surprised at quite how small the audience is - can't be more than 25% capacity. I was expecting more, particularly for Ives' richly packed and rarely performed 4th Symphony.

At least the poor attendance meant that it was not too hot in there, but it was a strangely cold audience, and not a particularly memorable concert.

New tack and old chic

Today we went over to North Greenwich to have a look at the recently reopened millennium dome - now renamed The O2. We were not really sure what to expect, but I have to say that they have done a pretty uninspiring job of fitting it out. There seems to have been a complete lack of imagination in designing the new buildings and structures inside. Instead of taking advantage of the huge covered space, they have crammed it with traditional buildings along a traditional street pattern. The result is quite claustrophobic in parts, and all rather pointless. To make matters worse, most of the buildings have been designed in a chinzy fake art deco style, giving it all a kind of tawdry mock Miami Beach feel (complete with fake palm trees). As a result, there is nothing special here, it is just like being in any mediocre shopping mall, except there are no shops - just a lot of franchised overpriced restaurants.

What a wasted oportunity. When you are building under a giant weatherproof tent you don't need walls, windows, roofs (or even doors) in the traditional sense. They could have done some really great stuff in here, but what you have is actually worse than the original Millennium contents (and some of that was quite poor). Shame on the developers/designers for turning out this insipid tat.


Depressed by the dull and unimaginative experience of the O2, we decided to get a riverbus on Thames Clippers new scheduled service between the O2 and Waterloo, to go and take a look at the also recently reopened Festival Hall. Here the opportunity for innovation was much more limited as it is a listed building (even the carpet is listed). However, the refurbishment of the interior seems to have gone quite well (even if it is clearly not quite finished yet). The original layout is virtually identical, but they have managed to create more space and keep (improve even) the light and airy feel of the lobby and foyer spaces. We had a good look around (at my insistance - I don't think that Dave was that interested really), and it is all still there - all the old places, the tucked-away lobby areas, they just seem to be a bit bigger now. It will be interesting to see how it all works when there is a concert on.

Of course the carpet is still there (at least it is the same design, but new carpet), and the overwhelming feel is light-natural-beige, and the stylish 50s chic that we love the Festival Hall so much for. So I am quite encouraged overall, but we didn't get to see inside the auditorium itself. That will probably be the subject of another blog.