In praise of the Dome

London’s City Hall stands empty. The bulbous, Foster + Partners-designed ‘glass testicle’ — in Ken Livingstone’s words — occupies one of the best sites in the capital: Thames-side, squaring off to the Tower of London, and overlooking Tower Bridge. But in December, its occupiers — the Mayor, the London Assembly and the Greater London Authority — deserted their glitzy £43 million headquarters for a cheaper building more than five miles east at the Royal Docks in Newham. It took them less than 20 years to outgrow their purpose-built home.

According to the architectural commentator John Grindrod, City Hall is a giant glass-and-steel metaphor. ‘The building represents the role of the London mayor in some sort of horrible way,’ he says. ‘Prime site, looks fantastic, brilliant symbol — but it’s not big enough for the job.’

Yet despite City Hall’s demotion, Grindrod argues that the building — which opened in 2002 — is one of a clutch of confident, neo-futuristic, turn-of-the-millennium UK projects that embodied a collective optimism unique to that time. And we should think again about their value.

In his new book Iconicon: A Journey Around the Landmark Buildings of Contemporary Britain, Grindrod explores how these buildings captured national aspirations at a moment before the trauma of 9/11 and the financial crash. Many were the work of the so-called ‘starchitects’ of the era: Norman Foster, Richard Rogers, Zaha Hadid and so on. Some are civic; some are commercial; many have endured, and some have failed.

They include the Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff (‘could not be more successful,’ says Grindrod); 30 St Mary Axe — AKA the Gherkin — (‘it is hard to think of a building from that era that is more loved’) — and of course the Dome, the vast exhibition centre that was to be the heart of the nation’s millennium celebrations, and the single structure most associated with the New Labour era.