As reported by: The Guardian
The Millennium Dome had been a massive gamble all along. A cool billion pounds rolled on the success or failure of a massive tent pitched on the North Greenwich peninsula, littered inside with a jumble of patronising stands celebrating the role of corporate sponsorship in New Britain and known collectively as the Millennium Experience.

Given what we knew of this Tory project lapped up hungrily by New Labour politicians from 1997, counting lampposts along the Old Kent Road was always going to be a more inspiring experience than those encountered inside the world's biggest big top. Many suggestions were made of how money lavished by fast-spinning politicians on this bread-and-circuses folly might be spent better elsewhere. In the event, the die was cast, the wheel spun: the fabric-walled colosseum lost. Heavily.

Now the dome has come into its own. It is going to be what, perhaps, it really wanted to be all along: a giant casino. Whether it succeeds or not, the dome-as-casino will be a metaphor for the way London, and other cities, is being "regenerated". Or shafted. London is a city built largely by developers gambling on the property and construction market. It is fuelled to a great extent by the fortunes of the City, a financial wheel of fortune riding higher and faster, and with the promise of greater thrills and spills than even the London Eye.

Its arteries, the tube network much in need of regeneration, were originally created by swindlers and gamblers, including Charles Tyson Yerkes, jailed for embezzlement in his native Philadelphia before heading via Chicago to London. His usual way of working was "to buy up old junk, fix it up a little and unload it upon other fellows".

Before he was hanged at Tyburn, near today's Marble Arch station, in 1725, Jonathan Wild, the infamous thief-catcher, government adviser on crime and trader in received goods, penned a letter from prison advising his successors in how to succeed where he had failed. "The public good," he wrote, "which has ever been the mask of self-interest and private avarice, must always be on the tip of your tongue. This notable phrase is swallowed down by the multitude with great approbation ... they cannot be made to think ill of the person whose favourite topic is the welfare of his country, not withstanding his more secret intentions are upon the most selfish principles in nature."

Today London is being redeveloped by men and women claiming to speak for the public good, who are learning to apply the principles of the casino, the gambler and even the villain to urban planning and redevelopment. The government is even prepared to gamble on building 120,000 developers' homes in the Thames Gateway, a floodplain east of London that will flood soon enough. These homes can be built elsewhere in London, but to do so would require imagination, careful planning, intelligent design and a curb on the enthusiasm of entrepreneurs and gamblers. Who cares? London likes a flutter, and should PPP companies charged with rebuilding Yerkes's tube lines go belly up, and if the Thames Gateway sinks, we can always thumb a lift to thedome for a bit of a flutter, and start all over again.