Do you remember the ArcelorMittal Orbit Tower? It is the “something extra” designed by Anish Kapoor and Cecil Balmond, to be a stunning feature of the Olympic Park and a lasting legacy of London’s hosting of the 2012 Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games. It is an amazing red tower, the UK’s tallest public sculpture, 114.5 metres high, swooping and swirling, and providing – on a good day – views of the London skyline up to 20 miles away. Despite extensive advertising it has not attracted as many visitors as expected, which reminds me a little of the Dome saga, of which more later.
Back in 2012, during the Paralympic Games, the Hopkins family zoomed up in the lift of the Orbit Tower and saw the whole bustling Olympic Park below. Maybe they even saw Sheila at the wheel of one of the posh new BMWs in which the official Olympic drivers chauffeured sportspeople to and fro.
Three years on, the plan is to rejuvenate the Orbit Tower. Tourists are to be tempted back to a tower transformed into the world’s longest helter skelter. The ride will loop around the steel tower seven times, making 13 twists before it ends in a 50 metre straight run. The ride is expected to last 40 seconds and users will reach speeds of up to 13 miles per hour. Will it attract the 3G Kili Climbers? After descending Mount Kilimanjaro it should be a piece of cake.
12 years before the Olympics, something even stranger than the Orbit Tower appeared in London; a structure that looked like a giant space ship parked next to the River Thames. This was the Millennium Dome, designed, as was the Orbit Tower, to be a focal point in the regeneration of a blighted area. The architect, Richard Rogers, deliberately gave it twelve yellow support towers, one for each month of the year, and a diameter of 365 metres, one metre for each day in a year (well, most years). The centre of the dome is 52 metres tall to represent the 52 weeks in each year. In a strange foreshadowing of what was to happen with the Orbit Tower, it was both criticised and praised, and it did not attract as many visitors as had been projected, leading to recurring financial problems.
There were public relations problems from the start. When a private opening party was held at the Dome on New Year’s Eve 1999 for the great and the good, there were problems with transport and weather. Worse still, when Auld Lang Syne was sung at the end of the evening, (which we saw on TV) the majority of the distinguished visitors crossed hands at the wrong time. Only the Queen got it right. For future reference, you start off holding hands with the person next to you, and only cross hands at the last verse when the lyrics say: “And there’s a hand, my trusty fiere / And gie’s a hand o’ thine!”. Fiere means friend, by the way.
After this underwhelming start, the Millennium Experience at the Dome, with probably far too many attractions and exhibits, was open to the public for the whole of 2000. I still have an original programme for it which came in very handy on the day of our visit. We planned our day carefully and had a simply wonderful time. I shall never forget the amazing circus, the mental flotation tank, (“escape the flurry of the Dome….filled with gentle sound, light, shapes and scents”) and the jewels. Ah the jewels! Priceless blue diamonds and the Millennium Star worth £200 million pounds, the object of an unsuccessful jewel heist later that year. The robbers had planned to escape with the jewels via the Thames in a speed boat but they were foiled by the Flying Squad, who had replaced the priceless jewels with fakes.
After that, almost everything was demolished, but today the dome still exists. It was rejuvenated and is now a key exterior feature of The O2, a state of the art arena, which Jae, Sheila and Katie climbed over a few years ago. So in the end the Dome was a success and let’s hope the Orbit Tower will be too.
The 3GKiliClimb team have recently tried out the altitude at the top of the London Eye. It is funny that we all thought it was going to be there just for a year, when it was erected in 2000, but 15 years later, it is still there, as it has proved to be such a success. I hope the three climbers look as happy at the top of Kilimanjaro as they do at the top of the Eye!
