25 years since the dawn of millennium, we look back at some of the landmarks created to celebrate the year 2000. Some were funded by the Millennium Commission*, a government backed national scheme which financially supported certain projects, while others came about independently. How many of these did you visit in the year that they were launched?
The Millennium Dome
Probably London's most iconic millennium marker — and, we think, the only one which features in the EastEnders credits (as it has done since September 1999) — the Millennium Dome was opened to much hullabaloo on 31 December 1999.
Promoted as the "first wonder of the new millennium", guests including then-PM Tony Blair and Queen Elizabeth II attended the New Year's Eve private launch event, Her Majesty presumably grateful that plans to slide her along a frozen River Thames for the occasion never came to fruition.
Not everyone was enamoured. The Irish Sunday World publication crowed: "Imagine if you took loads of pound coins and built them all up in a column until they reached the height of Liberty Hall... it would be a pretty stupid thing to build. But not nearly as stupid as building a sports stadium that nobody's going to use."
There followed the year-long Millennium Experience, which offered 14 themed zones for the public to explore, but only managed to attract around half of the projected visitor numbers.
In a way, the Millennium Dome no longer exists. Sure, the whomping great white tent still sits next to the Thames, but that name was ditched shortly after its ill-fated first year, and the dome then sat largely empty for a few years except for occasional use (who else remembers going to the Winter Wonderland experience of Christmas 2003?), until it officially rebranded as The O2 in May 2005. It's kept the same name since, though it did lose part of its roof to a storm in February 2022.
The transformation from failed tourist attraction to one of the world's top entertainment venues is seriously impressive, so we're marking this one as a success. And to be honest, we still can't quite fathom how that one tent is home to a 20,000 capacity arena and a smaller live music venue, plus London's biggest cinema (19 screens), indoor skydiving, a climbing centre, a trampoline park, a whole shopping outlet and scores of restaurants and bars.
Delve deeper with our brief history of The O2. Also nearby is the Greenwich Millennium Village housing development, the millennium sundial in Greenwich Park, and the Blackheath Millennium Circle. The area's intrinsically linked to the concept of time due to the Meridian Line, so it makes sense that the millennium would be celebrated so widely.
The Millennium Bridge
...Or as you may know it, the "wobbly bridge". The footbridge that crosses the Thames between St Paul's and the Tate Modern was a millennium addition, the first new bridge across the Thames in London for more than a century. It opened in June 2000... only to close a couple of days later, after it was found to wobble, swaying up to 75mm in each direction under the weight of sightseers who flocked to use it. While headline-writers around the world had great fun, engineers worked hard to solve the issue — Arup sending 700 of its own staff across the bridge to test it before it reopened to the public in February 2002. A 2008 study claimed to have solved the question of why the bridge wobbled... as did another study in 2018 and another in 2021. That didn't stop it closing for three weeks for urgent repairs in October 2023.
These days, it's hard to imagine London without the Millennium Bridge. It's featured in millions of Instagram photos thanks to its pleasing symmetrical vistas of St Paul's, and was used as a backdrop for a Death Eater attack in 2009 film Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. This time, the bridge moved significantly more than 75mm.
It's an art gallery in its own right too. Artist Ben Wilson has been painting miniature artworks onto discarded chewing gum on the bridge for several years. His 'chewing gum trail' was at risk when the bridge closed for maintenance in 2023 but thankfully most pieces survived.
Find out more about the Millennium Bridge, which also incorporates the Millennium Inclinator and the Millennium Measure, a plaque on the ground alongside a 2m-tall structure.
The Tate Modern art gallery, located in a former power station overlooking the Millennium Bridge, also opened in 2000, having received £50 million from the Millennium Commission to fund the building's conversion.
The Millennium Wheel
Say 'Millennium Wheel' to newer Londoners, and they might not know what you mean. But old-timers remember the days before the London Eye was officially named. The oversized ferris wheel opened on the banks of the Thames in March 2000, and was initially intended as a temporary structure, to be in situ for five years. Within two, it had been given permission to remain as a permanent fixture. With the recent influx of skyscrapers in London, it's now hard to believe that it offered the highest public observation point in London (only when you're at the top of the turn, presumably) until the Shard superseded it in 2013.
It's been through several sponsors in its time: British Airways, Merlin Entertainments, EDF Energy, Coca-Cola and latterly lastminute.com. Given that it's now outlived its intended stay five-fold, that is still has lengthy queues even on a cold, darkening winter's afternoon, and the fact that it's probably hosted more marriage proposals than almost anywhere else in London, we're deeming this one a wheely big success story.
Longplayer at Trinity Buoy Wharf
At midnight on 31 December 1999, a piece of music began playing... and it will continue to do so until the end of the millennium. Longplayer is a 1,000-year long composition by composer and musician Jem Finer, compiled from six shorter pieces of music playing simultaneously, in an arrangement which means that no combination will be repeated any time during the millennium.
It's housed within the lighthouse at Trinity Buoy Wharf, and can be visited for free most weekends. Inside the lighthouse, you'll find a listening post, as well as an installation of 234 singing bowls, used to create the music.
Despite only being 1/40th of the way through its lifespan, Longplayer's 25th birthday is being celebrated in several events in 2025, including Longplayer Live at Roundhouse in April. We won't be around to see whether it makes it to the end of its lifespan, but if anyone from the year 3000 is reading this (presumably via some sort of high-tech brain chips) can you send us a message back to let us know how Longplayer panned out?
London New Year's Eve fireworks
The now-annual pyrotechnics display which ushers in every new year debuted on 31 December 1999, as a way to celebrate the new millennium. It's not always been smooth sailing for the celebration on the Thames though. That first year was deemed a "flop" which "fizzled out" by revellers and critics who'd been promised a "River of Fire" (the same river which the was supposed to be frozen over for the Queen to slide down on the very same night, so not sure how that would have worked). Bob Geldof was somehow involved in organising that debut display.
A year later the fireworks were cancelled due to concerns of overcrowding, and the next NYE fireworks took place on 31 December 2003, to see in 2004. They've continued annually since then, skipping the 2020-2021 and 2021-2022 events due to Covid.
A quarter of a century on, the fireworks have gone through several incarnations, with ticketing introduced for the 2014-celebrations to help with crowd control. That year, tickets were priced at £10 each to cover costs, though Londonist found them being sold on for 20 times that. They remained at £10 for the next few years, up to and including the final pre-Covid display, to see in 2020. Then, for the 2022-2023 display, the price went up to £15. A year later, the price jumped to £20. Then, for the 2024-25 display, they were priced at £35-£50 per person, though London residents were eligible for a £15 discount.
As millennium legacies go, we can't see this one lasting much longer. Judging by the comments we receive on articles each year when the tickets go on sale, and a couple of brutally honest reviews of the 2024-25 display, Londoners have become disenchanted with this one and wouldn't be too sad to see it snuffed out altogether.
The Great Court at the British Museum
The British Museum is home to what it claims is "the largest covered public square in Europe", its two-acre Great Court, sitting beneath the famous tessellated glass ceiling in the heart of the building. It was opened by the Queen in December 2000, having received funding from the Millennium Commission and the Heritage Lottery Fund. Though the Great Court has stood the test of time in the intervening quarter of a century (some might say better than the institution it houses, which has seen its fair share of controversies in recent years), other parts of the building are due for an extensive revamp in the near future.
Look out for an apt inscription in the floor tiles on the south side of the Great Court: "and let thy feet, millenniums hence, be set in midst of knowledge" is an extract from The Two Voices by Alfred Tennyson.
Thames 2000 piers and boat services
River boat services are a workaday part of life in London today, thanks largely to the Thames 2000 project, which saw several piers (Tower Millennium Pier, Blackfriars Millennium Pier, London Eye Pier, Westminster Millennium Pier and Millbank Millennium Pier) updated or added to the River Thames, giving river services somewhere to operate from.
Thames Clippers (now UberBoat by Thames Clippers) was founded in 1999 and given the monopoly on running riverbus services, though these days several different companies operate services on the Thames. Like many Londoners, we don't use them all that often, but isn't it nice to know they're there if we ever do fancy a leisurely pootle down the river?
Brent Lodge Park Millennium Maze
We were over two decades late to this particular party, only stumbling across Hanwell's Millennium Maze in 2023. But it was planted back in the heady (or should that be hedge-y?) days of February 2000, to commemorate the millennium in the borough of Ealing, made of 2,000 yew trees.
We've not been able to track down any photos of it in its fledgling days, but presumably it was a bit less bushy than it is now. Either way, it's free and jolly good fun, so it's a thumbs up from us (and it's just a few steps away from Hanwell Zoo, if you're looking for a cheap day out in that part of town).
Lambeth Millennium Pathway in Archbishop's Park
A pathway cuts across the lawn at the southern end of Archbishop's Park in Lambeth, lined with red bricks and studded with 24 circular plaques. This is the Millennium Pathway, unveiled in June 2000 to celebrate "the people, places and events that have made Lambeth special over the last 1,000 years", with the subjects of the plaques chosen by local residents. Some are to be expected, from the establishment of Lambeth Palace in 1197, to locally-born John Major becoming Prime Minister in 1990. Others are a little more unusual: 1740 commemorates the death of "Margaret Finch, Queen of the Norwood Gypsies", while 62 years later, Matthews the Norwood Hermit gets a mention (pictured above).
London's millennium beacon
Up and down the land on 31 December 1999, led by Queen Elizabeth II (who, by all accounts, was very busy that day), 1400 beacons were lit to welcome the new millennium. Many still exist today, easiest spotted on bucolic country village greens, but London has one too. The British Gas-branded beacon is mounted on a wooden plinth at East India Dock Basin, right across the Thames from The O2, and just a short walk from Longplayer at Trinity Buoy Wharf. To the best of our knowledge, the beacon hasn't been relit since the millennium, which seems a wasteful shame, though do let us know if you have information to the contrary.
Bromley's Millennium Rocks
Bromley's so-called 'Millennium Rocks' are actually much older than that (about two billion years, give or take) but they arrived in the borough from North West Scotland as a geological nod to the new millennium. You can read the full story here and track some of them down, but mysteriously, nobody seems to know where they are, nor how many they are. As millennium markers go, they're a solid effort: likely to outlive anything else in this article, with a side of mystery and intrigue. In fact, they rock.
Southwark Cathedral Visitor Centre
If you've been to Southwark Cathedral in recent years, chances are you've been to the Visitor Centre: it's the more modern corridor on the north (Thames) side of the 13th century building, home to a walkway, cafe, shop and toilets. It was a millennium project, and though it wasn't opened until 2001 (by Nelson Mandela no less), the cathedral itself played a key role in Queen Elizabeth II's millennium celebrations: on her way to the shindig at the Dome (above), she and Prince Philip visited a nearby homeless shelter before taking part in a service at the cathedral. Lucky that icy fever dream didn't become a reality, really, or she might have slid right on past...
Miscellaneous millennium commemorations
Millennium Greens
Waterloo and Poplar are home to some of the 250 open spaces developed as part of the Millennium Greens Project across the country. Waterloo's was formerly a concrete car park, and is now home to open lawns, plants and flowers, and, briefly, a pride of lions. This page has the most complete list of London's Millennium Greens we've been able to find, including others in Southgate, Cricklewood and Chadwell.
Millennium clocks
Ornate timepieces were another way in which the millennium was marked in many places, their creators oblivious to the fact that within a few years we'd all be glued to our phones with their inbuilt clocks. Examples in London can be found in Highams Park, Walthamstow and Leyton. In a similar vein is the Wimbledon Millennium Fountain.
Millennium shield
Probably the least-known landmark on this list is the blingtastic IT Millennium Shield. It's located within the City Livery Hall of the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists, and contains the names of all the liverymen of the Company of Information Technologists in the year 2000.
Wrong millennium: Millennium Mills
Millennium Mills in Docklands is an odd one. The derelict warehouse looks too old to have been built to commemorate this millennium, but far too fresh-faced to have been built at the turn of the last millennium. That's because it's name has nothing to do with the passing of time: milling company Vernon and Sons named the mill after their most successful product, a flour variety called Millennium Flour.
*In the process of researching this article, we discovered that Diamond Geezer compiled a list of Millennium Commission projects in London, back in 2022. We've only covered a few of them in this article, so it's worth a read for further info.
