matt.me63.com - Matt Edgar

Love it or loathe it, Richard Rogers’ Dome was the architectural icon of of Britain’s new millennium. The hubristic creation of Michael Heseltine and Peter Mandelson, it was meant to symbolise our country’s post-Thatcher renaissance, all Britpop and Cool Britannia. It didn’t work out quite like that.

Along with millions of other Britons, we didn’t make it to the Dome in its inaugural year. We were too busy with our new arrival, our own Millennium baby. He just turned eight and for his birthday treat we took him and his friends to see the Tutankhamum exhibition at the Dome now renamed The O2.

Disclosure: I work for a competitor to O2, but my problem is not with their sponsorship. O2’s own branded interventions - a nightclub, ice rink and inflatable chill-out zones - have their own integrity and fit with the aesthetic of the Dome itself. The naming rights have been seen through with Orwellian ruthlessness: no mention of Millennia, or even of Domes, it’s The O2, plain and simple.

Yet our impression as we walked along the narrow shopping mall that skirts the perimeter of The O2 was a distinctly underwhelming “is this it?”

From the outside the space is huge, but the way the new arena, cinema, exhibition space and leisure facilities have been fitted in manages to totally obscure this once inside. Worse, the partitions that carve up the space are treated as clumsily cut out faux art deco stage setting with no acknowledgement of the structure itself.

Suburban shopping mall, airport terminal, Las Vegas casino, Dubai resort - this could be anywhere. Only it’s not just anywhere. It’s one of our landmarks, a tarnished one but a landmark all the same. Had the hype curve for the Dome dipped so low that we’d settle for this? Britain Deserves Better.

Today’s Manchester Guardian gives an unchallenged outing to metropolitan whinger Germaine Greer on the subject of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, near the heart of our 15-million-strong Supercity.

Complaining, apparently erroneously, about the amount of the nation’s collection of sculpture kept outside London, she sneers:

If you can manage to get yourself to West Bretton near Wakefield, you may see some of them dotted round the 500 acres of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park; others may be displayed in four indoor galleries. The park is seven miles from the nearest railway station and a taxi will cost you a tenner, which Londoners have to add on to the £112.50 - the least the day return will cost a single adult.

So Londoners, take note:

• This is only the price that we have to pay to visit the vast majority of the national collections that are housed in, er, London. The train runs both ways, you know.
• You don’t have to take a taxi. We have buses. And the driver may even respond to a cheery wave. Try that on the Tube and you’ll be arrested.
• Thanks to the YSP, my seven-year-old can bore for Yorkshire on the life and works of Andy Goldsworthy.
• It’s not just the sculptures. We’ve got your weapons too, and we’re not giving them back.

The Enlightenment philosopher David Hume proposed that identity is nothing but the bundle of our past experiences.

Don’t test me on this, because I just read it on Wikipedia, but it seems like a good place to start this piece of introspection on the need for a unified identity.

It goes like this.

Context: I work in two offices with different contactless card entry systems. I also have an Oyster card for travel in London. Several times I found myself absent-mindedly trying to get into the office by touching in with my Oyster card. (It doesn’t work.) Then I tried swiping my door card to get onto the Tube. (That doesn’t work either, but it annoys the person behind you in the queue.)

Problem: How to gain access to multiple offices and transport networks without thinking, thus freeing up vital seconds for scanning free newspaper headlines, checking answerphone messages and generally daydreaming.

Solution: I observed that many people now put all their entry cards, along with other stuff like tickets and house keys, into the handy plastic wallet that comes with an Oyster card.

I tried this DIY aggregation of authentication and payment: it works. Now the world’s my marine molusc (subject to the access restrictions imposed by Transport For London, my employer, and other competent authorities.)

At least it will be until I lose the whole lot of it in one go.