This is the Guardian.

Hi, my name is Imogen Westnights and I'm the author of this Guardian Longread.

Was the Millennium Dome really so bad, the inside story of a not so total disaster?

I was inspired to write this because I think like many people who were children

around the town of the millennium in Britain, I'd sort of nurse this weird almost fever dream

with the Millennium Dome where I have these memories of it that for a long time I wasn't sure

you did that really happen and I remember all this excitement and this school playground about,

there's going to be an empty gravity chamber all this kind of hype about the possibilities of

the dome and it's obviously still there the building on Greenwich Peninsula and so it's this

physical thing that's still on the landscape for a lot of people and in their memories but we

don't necessarily know a lot about how it actually came about. All remember very well what was in it

and why those things were in it and I noticed that it was 20 years coming up since the Millennium

which got me thinking about it again but also it was this big landmark piece of nation branding

really for Britain and very unsuccessful compared to something like the Olympics opening ceremony

in 2012. Brexit was a hot topic and I thought maybe now is a good time to look back at the dome,

talk to the people who were involved in putting it on and use that as a lens through which to

look at what what is Britishness what if we decided to build that into. It's a funny one because

this did come out almost to the day exactly when the pandemic really hit 12th of March 2020

so the world has changed a great deal since I was writing this piece but I think it still says

what I wanted it to say about Britain and Britishness it's sort of stood you know I gave

another reread him its conclusions haven't been wiped away by the pandemic like it did so many

things. I think what I was really surprised about is that initially I was most interested in it as

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