Mandelson 'made dome third rate

The Millennium Dome might have been saved from becoming a "mad woman's breakfast" if Peter Mandelson had kept his nose out if it, its former design guru claimed yesterday.

Stephen Bayley, who has been barred from the Greenwich site since he resigned as the dome's creative director two-and-a-half years ago, said political interference and a mixture of "crassness and incompetence" had wasted the greatest opportunity of our age.

In his first interview since the dome opened he claimed basic mistakes had been made because experts were neither listened to nor given creative freedom.

His early warnings about the quality of the contents and the confusing muddle of zones were not heeded.

"I wanted the best brains, artists and architects in the world to work on this. They said: 'no, you can't have them'. Instead they got a lot people who usually do trade fairs in Harrogate," he said.

"It's not their fault. They were asked to design with no brief. Nobody had thought anything through."

The politicians, and particular Mr Mandelson, the former minister for the dome, who Mr Bayley described as a "paradigm of bad management", must take the lion's share of the blame.

"The real scandal was that they were told, not just by me, but by many others, how to put it right, and they ignored that advice," he claimed. "I hate to say I told you so, but I did and they did not listen. They could not bear to listen to anyone who knew what they were talking about."

Mr Bayley's comments come as several designers who worked on the dome, and who still feel gagged by confidentiality clauses in their contracts, expressed disappointment with the results.

Nigel Coates who designed the Body Zone, described the dome as a curate's egg. Fellow architect Zaha Hadid said it was not radical enough, with management assuming "every visitor is an idiot who can't understand complicated ideas".

Others bemoaned the lack of an overall design guru. That was the role Mr Bayley quit "when I realised they would not allow me to do my job".

Muddle


Nearly all the designers complained about a culture of secrecy at the New Millennium Experience Company, which kept them from communicating with each other. "It is any wonder that it is a muddle when designers were not allowed to talk to one another," said Mr Bayley.

Mr Bayley said he was so unhappy with the content when he took over three years ago that he asked to put a stop to everything for six months to figure out what the dome was supposed to be about.

"It was a risk. But it could have been saved then. Instead they went on and spent £750m and we still don't know what it is for."

He said his pleas to employ a masterplanner of the calibre of Sir Norman Foster to "make some sense of the mess" were not just ignored but energetically rejected by Mr Mandelson.

"The results are unfortunately there for all to see," he added.

Mr Bayley said his vision was for a "dome of the future" where Tesco would have paid architects like Frank Gehry, the man behind the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, to design the shop of future complete with the foods of the future which people could buy. Guinness could have had the drinks of the future, and Ford the cars and transport of the future.

"People want voyeurism and surprise. Instead what we got was muddle and a lot of bad school projects," he said.

Mr Bayley, who founded the Design Museum, in London, said there was a nasty, secretive atmosphere inside the NMEC.

"There is no one in charge who knows what it is all for and about. That is why they are so glum and depressed and paranoid and afraid of any criticism, because they are confused in themselves."

But Mr Bayley reserved his greatest ire for the Litmus Group of the great and the good who vetted the quality of the content. "I don't so much blame Michael Grade, because he is just a businessman, but Alan Yentob [of the BBC], Christopher Frayling [of the Royal College of Art] and Neil Cossons of the Science Museum in London, are public servants who should have known better.

"They have betrayed the trust of the public and chosen to be placemen, who have suspended their artistic judgment for political preferment."

A NMEC spokesman said they never expected "people who walked away from us early on would come back into the dome with an open mind and say: 'It's great.'

"I understand also that Stephen Bayley would have strong views on the Litmus Group, since they effectively replaced him. They are all unpaid and have done some great work. They have all spent their ca reers in entertainment or education and we are grateful to them. Comments of this type are not helpful," he said.

"We found that after the experience of working with Stephen over six months, a single curatorial auteur was not going to work with a project of this complexity."

He denied that Peter Mandelson had a baleful influence on the company. "Peter did not set up the NMEC. He simply strengthened the management structures. It is a unique hybrid. There is a large dollop of the civil service and a large dollop of the private sector.

"Each side may find the other frustrating at times. We would have wanted an extra year but the lateness of the last election saw to that."

The spokesman insisted that the claims of excessive secrecy were unjust.

"A lot of people, including the designers have misunderstood this. The confidentiality applies to commercial matters only."