Millennium Dome

The Millennium Dome was the original name of the large dome-shaped building on the Greenwich Peninsula in southeast London, built to house a major exhibition marking the start of the third millennium. When it opened in 1999 it was the fifth largest building in the world by usable volume; the exhibition ran from January 1 to December 31, 2000, and drew barely half of the 12 million visitors its sponsors had forecast, so the project and exhibition were widely judged a failure by the press at the time, though the structure itself was later preserved and repurposed rather than demolished.