Luxury Briefing.

And when it comes to location, I am not even certain which half of the half-truth is correct.  Although it is an unexamined nostrum of the cufflinked property trade, the argument that site is one of the most important attributes in determining the viability of any business is very far from conclusively proved. There can be no better example of this than Greenwich Peninsula.

This was the site of the original Millennium Dome of which exercise in brainless, flatulent, profane narcissism I was very briefly and hilariously Creative Director in the roseate days of The Blair Dawn… which now seems as historically distant an era as Kipling and his hearty yarns of Imperium. Of course, it wasn’t a ‘dome’ at all, a dome being a self-supporting hemi-spherical masonry or brick structure. It was a tent.  But fully congruent with the glazed megalomania of the day, Millennium Tent did not have the requisite WF (wow factor) on the PMS (Peter Mandelson Scale). So Dome it was.

And this site was actually, and later metaphorically, a toxic bog.  Actually, to tell the truth it was also an inaccessible toxic bog. After years of abuse by the predecessor of British Gas, the subsoil of Greenwich Peninsula was as stuffed with toxins as William Burroughs at Jack Kerouac’s birthday party.  An orange plastic boundary layer had to be laid beneath the Tent to prevent noxious vapours arising as if from Hades. Trucks had to go through wheel-washers before going off-site, the better to prevent the spread of poisonous toluene and organo-phosphates throughout south London.

And, although here we dabble in metaphysics, it is irresistible to suggest that the miasma arising from the bog had some sort of melancholy effect on Tent management, if that is the right word.

The Richard Rogers Partnership had designed a most elegant and impressive structure whose quality may be sussed from the speed with which its silhouette was appropriated into visual code for ‘London’. Yet the Millennium ‘Experience’, a redundant amplification which Mandy insisted on, was dire kitsch and properly ridiculed. Many people blamed the site in this forbidding part of London. Others cited its poor communications:  there was a new tube, but road was impossible and the river’s potential is difficult to realise.

Yet 10 years on The 02 Arena on the very same forbidding site has become Europe’s most popular concert venue.  Transport arrangements are largely unchanged and the peninsula has not moved, so location, location, location seem to have small relevance to customer enthusiasm. True, the magnificent, but absurdly cavernous Tent, has in fact been filled with a new more practical building, but the reasons for 02’s success are independent of site and structure. It is managed with conviction and has an absolutely clear sense of identity, whereas the Millennium Experience was organised like a Japanese fire drill and there was not a single person able to explain what it was meant to be. They had to ask focus groups.

So here’s the site-non-specific version of The Better Mouse Trap Argument. Do something with clarity and conviction and the world will beat a path to your door… even if it is on a toxic bog.

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