REMEMBER when small was beautiful. Well, get real. For the new millennium, the green mantra is now 鈥淏ig is Beautiful鈥�. In the abandoned coalfields of South Yorkshire, an ex-Greenpeace finance director is spending 拢120 million from the Millennium Commission and corporate sponsors on a temple to a 鈥渟ustainable future鈥�.
Part theme park, part green 鈥渆xpo鈥�, part field research centre, and part trade exhibition, the Earth Centre will be among the biggest construction projects in the north of England over the next five years. Here, in one of the most blighted industrial landscapes in Britain, the project鈥檚 founder, Jonathan Smales, is planning to build three giant 鈥渕illennium pavilions鈥�.
The buildings include a 拢26 million 鈥渁rk鈥�, a futuristic construction in the shape of a hovering butterfly, twice the size of St Paul鈥檚 Cathedral, which will be heated using solar power by day and glow by night. There will be a 100-bed hotel for visiting executives, a 200-seat restaurant and a conference centre straddling the River Don.
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Vision or hubris?
Surrounding the pavilions will be fish ponds and hatcheries, walks through the Denaby Ings wetland, an organic 鈥渕illennium farm鈥�, reed beds to purify sewage, a wind farm and a permanent research centre. On the spoil heaps of Denaby Main and Cadeby collieries, the worlds of Buckminster Fuller and Friends of the Earth will meet. But is it green vision or green hubris?
The Earth Centre, already five years in the planning, got its big break in September, when the Millennium Commission handed Smales 拢50 million to get building. But the 140-hectare site, wedged beneath a dramatic limestone escarpment between the rivers Don and Dearne and a canal, has been open for business since July.
You can hop off the local train, clamber through a broken fence, pay 拢2.50 at the garden shed-cum-ticket offfce and saunter along muddy riverside walks, to peer at the fish hatchery and a couple of highland cattle. Or you can buy a coat made from recycled plastic bottles in the retail marquee, go pond-dipping for sticklebacks or climb the spoil heap to test the potential power of the local wind, and fear for the site staff, hunkering down for the winter with only a couple of Portakabins, a yurt from the plains of central Asia and a half-completed geodesic dome for shelter.
The site still has one foot in the Industrial Revolution. It is just outside Kilner鈥檚 Bridge (which gave its name to the Kilner jar), and close to a spectacular railway viaduct, along which visitors to the completed centre will be transported by a new light railway.
The tabloids announced the centre recently as a 鈥済reen Disney park鈥�, but there will be no white-knuckle rides. Rather, the precedents are Victorian. Smales calls it the 21st-century equivalent of the Great Exhibition, which attracted 6 million visitors to London鈥檚 Hyde Park in 1851. The idea is to draw in the public with education and inspiration: a green message and futuristic architecture to celebrate the new postindustrial world.
Smales wants the centre to become a national showcase for energy efficiency and waste recycling technologies, and a resource centre for both education and science. But some conservationists just wish that it would go away. 鈥淚n some ways we have had least support from local environmentalists,鈥� says Smales. 鈥淧erhaps they think we are treading on their territory.鈥�
There is more to it than that. The sheer size of the centre offends, and there have been heated arguments with the local branch of the Council for the Protection of Rural England (CPRE). In particular, they object to the large amounts of traffic it will generate. There is anger at its boast of easy access from motorways. In the opening year 鈥� 2000, of course 鈥� the centre hopes to attract 2.5 million visitors, and a million a year thereafter. Most people will come by car. 鈥淏ut the view we take is that if they don鈥檛 come to us, they will go out driving somewhere else,鈥� says Smales. 鈥淪o why shouldn鈥檛 they come here?鈥� In any case, he argues, it is only about as many cars as visit a typical Sainsbury鈥檚 in a year.
To help pull in the crowds, Smales spent more than 拢1 million on research and planning before a sod was dug. He has recruited a marketing adviser who worked for 10 years at Alton Towers, Britain鈥檚 biggest theme park, and a frequent target for groups such as the CPRE, which last year publicly attacked inappropriate, large-scale leisure developments in the countryside.
Smales makes few concessions to traditional greens 鈥� least of all vegetarians. The rabbits on display in their pens will eventually show up on the canteen menu. The pig already has. 鈥淲e are miles away from the old green method of campaigning through protests and crusades,鈥� admits Smales. 鈥淲e want to be inclusive.鈥�
That means blue chips as much as green chic. His consultants, Coopers and Lybrand, have carried out the main feasibility study, and his civil engineers are Ove Arup. Saatchi & Saatchi is doing the PR and fund raising. Yorkshire Water is helping establish the reed beds and Smales has British Steel and Sainsbury鈥檚 lined up to fund specific projects. Unilever may be next.
The research community seems equally keen to get involved. Indeed, the centre鈥檚 science council, formed last March, may have secured the Millennium Commission cash through the contacts of its chairman Sir Crispin Tickell, warden of Green College, Oxford, and chairman of the government鈥檚 Panel on Sustainable Development. The science council also boasts Sir Martin Holdgate, former chief scientist at the Department of the Environment, television botanist David Bellamy, and Graham Ashworth, chairman of Going for Green a government initiative to increase public awareness of environmental issues.
But the prime mover on science 鈥� at least until the appointment of a science director early in 1996 鈥� is Jacqueline McGlade an ecosystems analyst at the University of Warwick. She sees the site and its construction projects as research resources in their own right. 鈥淲hat we really want to do,鈥� she says, 鈥渋s find ways of turning research quickly into practical projects,鈥� such as cleaning water with reed beds, converting biomass into biogas and energy and sustainable aquaculture. She also wants the centre to be an 鈥渆copolis, a centre for promoting green industries and clean technologies, not just on the site but in the surrounding region鈥�.
According to McGlade, the centre could be turned into a field university, with strong links to local educational institutions. 鈥淚 would anticipate 20 to 30 scientists working here at any one time,鈥� she says, either doing research on the site, or using the electronic library and teleconferencing facilities she wants to establish.
Smales, meanwhile, is working hard developing educational and local links. 鈥淲e don鈥檛 want a green expo here, cut off from the community,鈥� he says. 鈥淲e want the people here to work and play here, and to feel involved.鈥� He has lived in a local mining village for the past three years, and is signing up locals as 鈥渕embers鈥� of the centre. He hopes they weren鈥檛 too dispirited when half of the 2000 trees they planted last winter died in the summer drought.
Several of the projects already under way 鈥� such as the fish nursery and vineyard (Chateau Ivanhoe) 鈥� were local initiatives, by a former miner and the local wine guild respectively. But involvement will be the key. As one local put it at a recent meeting: 鈥淲e don鈥檛 want to be the ice-cream sellers at the castle.鈥�
For now, the centre is going through its honeymoon period. The knot has been tied with the Millennium Commission. Local councils, through the Dearne Valley Partnership, are falling over themselves to encourage a project that could bring up to 800 jobs, as well as kudos to the region. Everything is possible and many of the contradictions and conflicts have not yet emerged.
Uncertain future
Some questions are obvious, though. Is it really sensible to spend tens of millions of pounds constructing new prestige buildings on a site also being used to do research into the reclamation of colliery wastes? Landscaping has already created one large unwanted pool of polluted water on the site. Everybody hopes that the ark building, which will be partly embedded into the hillside to conserve heat, won鈥檛 be inundated in five years鈥� time.
What, also, of the commercial considerations? Will the desire to allow in only those trade exhibitions involving genuinely green technologies survive the first belt-tightening in, say, 2001? And, when tourist visits sag, will the big dipper be far behind 鈥� perhaps with an eco-apocalyptic theme?
But the most important question is can Big ever be Beautiful to Greens? Is a mega-expo on sustainable development a contradiction in terms? We shall, as Smales agrees, soon find out.