So when the village opens alongside the Dome on 31 December 1999 there will only be a handful

So when the village opens alongside the Dome on 31 December 1999, there will only be a handful of residents to see the fireworks.Greenwich Council has an agreement that 25 per cent of the site will be affordable housing, but their insistence that most of it is two-storey with private gardens rather than clustered around communal gardens has actually reduced that figure to 21 per cent.English Partnerships is putting a brave face on the difficulties. “Already we have a waiting list for them and not a stone has been laid,” claims Glenn Baxter, the media and marketing executive for Millennium Village and English Partnerships.Yet no contract has been signed with the consortium – the architect Ralph Erskine, architects Hunt Thompson Associates, the developer Countryside Properties and builder Taylor Woodrow. Rows over contamination of the old gasworks site are said to be slowing it down.English Partnerships, which has spent pounds 180m cleaning up the site, claims that the least contaminated area on the peninsula is the housing area, yet they admit that not all the toxic material from the old gasworks was removed from the site. Contaminated material locked underground was capped.Now a marker warns contractors about entering a contaminated area when they sink foundations or pipework underground. By Christmas, the deal should be signed and sealed.So is the Britannia estate at Royal Docks the way forward for Docklands – even though there is no way onto the Docklands Light Railway until the bridge is opened? With just 250 Wimpey homes with bolt-on porticos and pediments and its own waterfront net-curtained crescent, Newham councillors claim the estate is a good mixed-use residential area with a junior school, shops and housing association accommodation. But will that make it a community?People want to live in towns, not in suburbia and not in the country.

But for too many people, urban regeneration means lonely high-rise estates, vandalism, boarded up factories and warehouses, soulless shopping and brutal office blocks. Even in areas where millions of pounds have been spent, it can mean a cement spaghetti junction ending in a brick wall Or in a bridge that goes nowhere For the residents of Britannia there is still no escape.. SO MANY new museums and art galleries have opened in the last 20 years that you can buy comparative coffee-table books about them. They have indeed become the secular churches and cathedrals of the late 20th century. Few, however, have had their objects ecumenically and ceremonially blessed in church in front of the largest gathering of crafts, trades and professions for 200 years. Last Sunday, the inauguration of the Museum of Scotland took place in the awesome and dignified sepulchre of St Giles in Edinburgh. Patently, the new museum, in Scots’ eyes at least, was not just yet another museum.

The Museum of Scotland, the 1991 winning design of one of the largest and most controversial of international competitions, may be the finest Scottish building of the 20th century.
The museum’s director, Mark Jones, described the project as completing “unfinished business”. Scotland began to accumulate its appropriate national cultural institutions during the Enlightenment but, until now, never had a purpose-built structure to contain the breadth of objects required to represent its history. Once the concept of the Museum of Scotland was coined in 1981, what began as a simple matter of a new title for the Scottish collections acquired weightier overtones The idea swelled over the decade. Just two years later, the “presentation of distinctive or outstanding aspects of the nation’s culture” had become a “sanctuary of national pride”.Almost inevitably a few years later, the ambition arose for the building to be a “symbol of national identity”. By the time of the architectural competition in 1991 – long before Braveheart – Magnus Magnusson had defined its purpose as reflecting the nation’s place in the wider world. No surprise, therefore, that there was pressure to open it on St Andrew’s Day.The National Museums of Scotland had been created from two, previously separate museums.

The Royal Scottish Museum (RSM) in Chambers Street and the Museum of Antiquities in Queen Street had both been acknowledged to be short of space and requiring extensions, or a new building, first in 1929 and then in 1951. Expansive plans were gradually whittled away until both were forced to negotiate for shared use of a new site next to the RSM Four schemes were developed and abandoned. The conflict could be symbolised by the RSM’s desire for a planetarium and the Antiquities’ desire for a medieval hall. Natural incompatibilities were exacerbated by the jockeying for space; the project was abandoned after 20 years.A committee set up by the government recommended separate museums on separate sites but the government rejected that and merged the two museums, selected the current site but sold half of it. Lord Bute was appointed to chair the merger, and then the trustees of the new institution.