“THERE IS NO SUCH WORD AS CAN’T”
GRANNY ELSIE
ERIC MCMILLAN BIOGRAPHY
(Chapter
2)
Fourth Edition, Chapter 2
© Eric McMillan 2024
The
Looking back through the long lens of time, b y 1980 I had become confident in my own talent, and the revolutionary power of play in shaping society
W.E.D the creative arm of Disney were impressed by my work and offered me a job working with them on designing an urban inner city attraction They gave me a grand tour of all their Burbank studios. When I arrived back in my Toronto studio I wrote a letter agreeing to join their design team, but I insisted that I have complete creative control of the project. Marty Skylar at W .E.D was very polite, but declined.
After Sesame Place , I wanted to design, build and operate my own attraction, just like Walt Disney in EPCOT. Art is not only oil and canvas it’s a way of thinking, believing that if presented with a problem, one can design a working solution; this was my thinking in the early nineteen eighties.
In 1980 when we tried to buy Manchester's Central Station and set up our own urban renewal play attraction. Central Station in 1980 was an abandoned magnificent Victorian engineering wonder of glass and iron, sitting at the center of Thatcher's deindustrialized North of England
I was born into the English industrial working class. By the time I resurfaced in the North of England I had formed a design group in North America with two partners, Rose Duell and Len Rydahl, and we were making fortunes for private capital in the theme park industry, as well as working on various World Fairs. When I returned to the North in the 1980's I saw communities in collapse, the North of England looked like one big falling out party. In the crumbling industrial North of England I saw the possibilities of building social bridges around abandoned structures, an alternative to the urban butchery of cowboy capitalism and inept local bureaucracies.
Mine was a unique perspective; I had grown up part of the English industrial working class and was now returning with all my North American experiences I also felt a deep debt to the people of the North for shaping the very clay of my personality . The citizens of Salford funded my four years at Salford Art School. I still had family there.
The North of England
Having played successfully in the American investment market, I was able to show a decent return on capital , on each of our Northern inner city projects.
These Northern dreams are the work of many bright and dedicated people; I was just the glue that held it all together for a while.
Unfortunately we were too late to purchase Central Station, six months earlier a deal had been signed with Minister Michael Heseltine of Thatcher's Central Government to rip off its glass roof and replace it with a solid roof that when completed turned this Paxton cathedral of light into a dark, damp, empty, exhibition hall.
Thatcher's de industrialization of the North of England reads like some Central Planning farce. The man appointed by Thatcher to head the closing of the Manchester Ship Canal was selected for the task because of his knowledge of Antarctic penguins. He hated the North. Every Friday afternoon, leaving the Duke of Bridgewater's mansion, he would take the fast train back to London for a cheery weekend. There are people in the south of England who view the English North as a wet Siberia.
For cost saving purposes the penguin specialist had originally planned to fill the canal in until it was pointed out that a significant percentage of the communities along the canals thirty seven mile journey to Liverpool would drown. Thatcher refused to have work fed into unionized communities. When the fleet of ocean travelling ships of the Manchester Ship Canal was to be turned into scrap, the Sheffield steel mills were not given the work. The whole fleet was shipped to Spain, broken up, melted down, then shipped back to Liverpool as rusting ingots to stand at the docks edge, monuments to misguided attitudes of the people in the South who crafted the insane plan.
Had it not been for the fabulous wealth of the North Sea oil, I suspect the whole de industrialization would have become nastier. Generally the laid off workers were given generous redundancy settlements, but the ethic of a working c ommunity was broken Hitler bombed the N orthern cities but never broke the working communities. But misguided Magi did!
It was during this time I met Howard Goodie the sales agent for Central Station. He was keen on the vision of our project He introduced me to the head of Manchester Planning and Development, who offered as a consolation prize for our failed Central Station efforts, the abandoned Great Northern Railways Warehouse with its wonderful Victoria n facade that ran all the way down Deansgate.
The Great Northern Railway Goods Wearhouse
As a teenage house painter I worked inside that Victorian facade with Ernie Griffiths painting the vast ceiling of Miss Tweed's academy for girls dance school. It was whilst working on a high wooden scaffold I, together with my four inch brush, were eagerly painting the high ceiling, when I heard the outraged scream of Miss Tweed echoing in the empty dance studio: “What creature, what vermin has used the toilet and not flushed it”. It was me. In my family one only flushed solids. I did indeed feel very small and ashamed as I tried to adapt, to the routines and habits, of a different class
Mark Franklin, the architect on our team, was a real talent on the project. We covered all details, design, construction, operation, and profit. It was a great plan. The Manchester City development people were enthusiastic.
Manchester Ship Canal
The Great Northern project unfortunately sank into a quagmire of politics, power and class prejudice, but our work was noticed and the Manchester Ship Canal came into our lives.
The Manchester Ship Canal during this time was being deindustrialized. It was suggested to the management of the Ship Canal that Eric McMillan was the ‘go- to’ genius who could redesign the Canal’s future development.
We decided to start with a modest proposal. We took Number Nine Dock and employed it as a model of how to begin to rebuild a broken industrial community. The following is the result of our work.
The Manchester Ship Canal proposal was a sound and sensible plan. We presented it in detail to the political and civic elite of Manchester and Salford. They were very polite, but never invited us back to be part of the C anal’s future development. There goes the story of the one eyed man being king in the country of the blind. Here, it appears the reverse was the truth. All the buildings were demolished and shopping centers and houses were built over them and the canal became an open sewer. They destroyed all memories from a great past, memories that could have become the corner stones of a new working community.
As I look back over this time I'm amazed how confident I was with all my English projects, particularly those in the North. It was the ‘can do’ confidence I acquired during my North American working experience. However I did not allow for the games of local power and politics, I was not qualified to deal in political power play.
It was Jamie Bell of the Ontario Science Center who made me aware of the plans of Vivian Clore ( heiress to Charley Clore fortune) to build a children’s interactive museum in London England.
On learning this I wrote to MS Clore , introduced myself, and offered to design the attraction for free if she moved the project into one of the North's inner cities. She agreed to my proposal, and downtown Halifax Yorkshire was selected and Eureka Halifax opened in 1988
Len and I spent a week in Halifax Yorkshire checking out the existing site and situation. It was a depressing time of Thatcher’s closing down industrial production.
One farce I saw being played out on site in Halifax was a crew of men on a ‘Make W ork’ project for the unemployed industrial workers. They paid a crew to first dig up the well laid cobble stones in the railway station's courtyard then the same work crew members were instructed go back to the beginning of the deep trench and fill it all in again. Perhaps such employment was considered an advance on the treadmill. This was in the time of Thatcher's deindustrialization of the North of England.
Halifax Yorkshire for me had the feeling of a wet coffin. I n one week Len wore out an umbrella. Should I ever return to the North of England I would be dead in two winters. Its dampness has zero appeal to me. The people were open, confused, just hanging on during the trauma of Thatcher’s deindustrialization. The only Halifax industry she preserved was the job of making parts for atomic bombs. Halifax was the machine engineering center of England. But not after Mad Maggie had played her fiddle. It became the glue sniffing capital of the world.
If I have a gift, an intuitive guide that casts the occasional creative shadow, it certainly was at work during the development of Eureka Halifax. Looking back I see this project was my last design dance with my partner Len Ryda hl. But what a dance. It was one of the best designs I have worked on. It was an inspired plan everything fitted like some snug fitting solution to a complex problem. I also felt somehow I had honored the memory of my Sheffield grandparents.
We made our Eureka presentation at London's Royal Academy . Vivian Clore was accompanied by an elderly advisor who after we had completed our presentation said ''you should have got this job '' That's when we became aware that Vivian Clore had already given the project to another group. It was a cruel disappointment after all the effort and treasure we invested in the projects development.
But our involvement was not a complete failure. We had the satisfaction of knowing that we had succeeded in persuading MS Clore to build her proposed children's museum in an English Northern inner city.
A burst of steam marks the Earth’s movement Clock becomes animated and performs every through space as the Foucuault Pendulum ten minutes. Talking Chairs tell local legends collides with a crystal crown. recorded by the old people of Halifax about
The opportunity to desi gn a space and science park came in 1983. By size and budget it's the largest project I have ever designed Three hundred and eighty acres and six hundred million dollars.
Scott Osborne and I first met at a New Orleans conference on Science and Learning. Around that time I was working on Sesame Place He invited me to visit the Huntsville and present examples of my past work.
Huntsville Alabama was the birthing place of the American space program, it's were Wernher von Braun and his German team engineered the foundations of USA space program. Following the Germans’ defeat at the end of the Second World War the German engineers were captured and smuggled into the United States, first to Los Alamos in New Mexico, then to the US army’s Redstone arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama. Much of the early space programs advances, such as the Saturn rockets and Skylab were developed in Huntsville. With all the hardware generated by the space research activity, the Alabama Space and Rocket center was born, the world's largest rocket collection.
Following my presentation to the eminent members of the Huntsville community, representatives of the Armed Forces and NASA, I was asked if I were willing to design a plan for the space science park, and how much would be my design fee. In reality I had never done a job of this complexity and scale but without too much thought, I replied "yes” and “one hundred thousand dollars" The Huntsville mayor was a little taken aback by my design fee. But I was hired, and the Alabama Space and Science Exhibit Commission engaged Eric McMillan Inc. to plan the space science park. At that time I had no idea how I was to handle such an enormous challenge, orchestrating the design of a commercially viable space science park, but in the end we produced a jewel of a master plan.
How does one whet the appetite for knowledge? Preparing children for space travel was an interesting challenge. The team that we assembled to address this challenge were all from a creative tribe I had worked with before, Len Rydahl, Martin Liefhebber, Richard Hall, Rose Duell, Wayne Wilson.
The 380-acre site of the Space Science Park contains extensive natural woodland areas and a number of interconnecting key elements that together represent the total Science Park experience:
In order to ensure a lively and rich visitor experience which takes advantage of the full potential of the existing land mass and adjacent road systems, we have positioned the various elements with a view to maximizing them as attractions in their own ri ght, but also as integral components of the whole Science Park.
Space Camp Dormitory
One of the first tasks was that The Space Science Park accommodate the children attending its Space Camp Dormitory
Space Tower Three celebrates the future. Space campers prepare to go into space by working in buoyancy tanks, shuttle simulators and various other training devices.
The design team worked wonders on the master plan but in addition developed design details beyond the client’s original request, including a whole range of interactive space oriented experiences. It was a fascinating project to work on and fun to do.
The client was satisfied. The Space Camp was built and the scale model of our master plan for the space science park is on display at the Alabama Space Science Museum in Huntsville Alabama
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