Off to see Timberlake at the new-look Dome tonight? Make sure you don’t get the wrong venue. The Greenwich attraction isn’t the only O2 in town…
The O2, Greenwich Peninsula
Function: Entertainment venue, including stadium, 11-screen cinema and exhibition space. Includes Justin Timberlake.
Age: 7.5 years. Opened at the end of 1999 as the Millennium Dome, now recalled to life as the O2.
Capacity: 20,000 in the main arena.
Size: 365 m diameter and the largest single-roofed structure in the world.
Cost: £789 million, plus plenty of maintenance and development costs since.
Transport links: Ready access by Jubilee Line, several bus routes and the Blackwall Tunnel by car.
Neighbours: Antony Gormley’s Quantum Cloud, North Greenwich Tube.
Celebrity spotting: Stars such as the Rolling Stones and Prince will be a common fixture. Tutankhamun, that great early contemporary of the Stones, will also be making an appearance in November.
Bonus fact: That big hole in the side? It’s a ventilation shaft from the Blackwall Tunnel.
The O2 Centre, Finchley Road
Function: Retail and leisure complex. Includes Sainsburys, Habitat, 8-screen cinema, Books Etc.
Age: 9 years.
Capacity: several thousand shoppers, plus a bounty of tropical fish in the aquarium.
Size: About 400 m long if you include Homebase.
Cost: Who knows? But worth every penny for the fish tank. The terrapin, by the way, is called Aloysius.
Transport links: Close to the Metropolitan and Jubilee lines, the North London Line (Silverlink), and numerous bus routes along Finchley Road. Sizable car park.
Neighbours: Walkabout pub.
Celebrity spotting: Londonist once eyeballed Kevin Spacey on the lower floor. He was carrying some bread.
Bonus fact: The O2’s car park was once twinned with Arizona’s Painted Dessert. No, really.
Function: Simple diatomic molecule that participates in varied chemical reactions and biological processes.
Age: Approximately 11 billion years.
Capacity: 16 electrons.
Size: 0.000000000129 m
Cost: Given the current security climate, we’ll let you Google ‘Oxygen cylinder’ for yourself.
Transport links: Abundant gas, easily reached from anywhere on the Earth’s surface. O2 is itself readily transported around the body via haemoglobin molecules in the red blood cells.
Neighbours: nitrogen and fluorine, in the periodic table.
Celebrity spotting: According to textbooks, oxygen makes up about 20% of Air (the remainder being Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoît Dunckel).
Bonus fact: Oxygen also comes in a triangular, O3 form better known as ozone.
Discover other things called O2.
