Millennium Mills: the ‘brand experience’ replacing one of London’s last great ruins
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Version 0 of 1. After Battersea power station, Millennium Mills is the last untouched ruin in London. It has “Keep out!” signs, fences within fences, and lethal features that extend from asbestos to falling masonry to multistorey drops. Squatting at the heart of the Royal Docks, Canary Wharf’s bigger but less celebrated East End sibling, its rotting concrete hulk glowers at the surrounding crane-filled skyline. You can easily see it, if you are gliding past on the DLR. It is a panorama made up of City airport, the sprawling offices of Newham council, the arms fair-hosting ExCel exhibition centre, and, of course, dozens of luxury flats from the pitched-roofed cul-de-sacs of the 1980s to the Trespa, glass and tile towers of the 2000s and the brick-clad contextual yuppiedromes of today. The mill couldn’t remain abandoned, given the capital’s lack of land, and proposals have just been approved to develop the Silvertown site with offices and housing, including a tech hub and “brand experience pavilions” planned for the mill itself. The development will include offices, housing, a tech hub and 'brand experience pavilions' Millennium Mills was already a brand of sorts before it became derelict – the huge concrete flour mill carried the company name Spillers in chic 1930s sans serif. After it was closed in the early 1980s, it became a hulking symbol of London’s decline and de-industrialisation that featured in music videos and films such as Terry Gilliam’s Brazil or Derek Jarman’s aptly titled The Last of England. If this soon-to-be “brand experience” hub ever had a brand, it was England as the place modernity went to die – or, as the voiceover has it in Jarman’s film, where “the future was cancelled, due to lack of interest”. The kind of brand experience that might be planned for the shiny, reopened mill will not, as with its first incarnation, be selling something actually produced in the building. Nor will it involve marketing the area’s decay. So what actually is a “brand experience pavilion”? To quote one provider, Hypsos, it usually entails a space offering a connection “between brands and people emotionally” – their examples include pavilions for Manchester United and Heineken. It is unlikely those at Millennium Mills will be similar to this, or to some of the touristic brand experiences that have opened in London of late, such as M&M’s World, which takes up one corner of Leicester Square with several floors devoted to permutations of small sugar-coated sweets. Given that the plan is for Millennium Mills to become an “innovation quarter”, that sort of kitsch is unlikely. A better comparison is the adiZones that were built in the same borough, Newham – one of the poorest in the country – when it hosted the Olympics. This was less an obvious act of branding and more an extreme form of private-public infrastructure, where open-air gyms in the borough’s parks and open spaces were branded with Adidas logos and, when seen from the air, formed the London 2012 Olympic logo. According to artist Alberto Duman, who has made projects inspired by these strange brand experiences, they’re an acute example of the “corporatisation of contemporary life in the UK and beyond”. Related: Hooray for London Road fire station – and the activists saving our buildings | Ally Fogg The adiZones, like most public–private partnerships and private finance initiatives, were a means by which the public sector could discharge its responsibilities – here, to offer sporting facilities to working-class youth – while also “encouraging business”. Like them, the cost is not evenly spread – 50% of construction costs and all maintenance is paid for by the state. But they are an insidious form of brand experience, working as an ostensibly normal piece of infrastructure, rather than an obviously themed pavilion. Millennium Mills, being in the Docklands, which already turns its back on the poor of Newham, may not play host to such examples of overbearing brand responsibility. Elsewhere in Newham, though, you can see a future where the brand experience is everywhere. |