Letter: A very short millennium

Sir: The news that the covering of the Millennium Dome may now last up to 25 years fails to move me. The whole project is virtually without meaning in the context of celebrating a new age.

One wonders what sort of monument the Victorians would have produced if they had fielded the new millennium. Apart from a celebration of themselves and their culture by way of a Crystal Palace-type exhibition (like, I suppose, our Dome), they would probably have constructed a specific monument, probably in granite and marble, inscribed with a few sonorous lines by Kipling. Complacent and overbearing perhaps, but such a monument would have had at least a fair chance of lasting 1,000 years, a small, dedicated "Hello" to our descendants.

As it is, our millennium project will come and go, and not make much impression on anyone.

In 1,000 years, the free-market approach which has produced the Dome will presumably have been shown as either a great success or greater failure. Either way, the Dome builders will have left little or nothing to show that their hopes and dreams for our future extended much further than a single generation, let alone 1,000 years.

JAMES GOODMAN

Weston-super-Mare

North Somerset