Millennium Point is a decade old this year. Paul Dale reports on the £114 million project that raised strong passions

It is difficult to remember now, a decade later, the less than enthusiastic welcome given to Millennium Point by many people in Birmingham.

Traditionalists hated it because it had replaced the much-loved city centre Science Museum in Newhall Street.

Not only would visiting Millennium Point’s Discovery Centre involve a trek out to Eastside for goodness sake, you would have to pay for the privilege of inspecting the exhibits while the Science Museum had been free.

The mood hardened when it emerged that many of the dusty chunks of iron on display at the Science Museum, deemed by some to be the city’s industrial crown jewels, would not have a place at Millennium Point.

And a decision to change the name of the Discovery Centre to Thinktank was greeted with a howl of disapproval. Too trite and gimmicky for such a serious subject, it was claimed.

The box-like structure of the building did not go down well either, even though the architect, Nicholas Grimshaw, had received rave reviews for designing Waterloo Station’s International Terminal in London and the Eden Project in Cornwall. His efforts in Birmingham were derided as uninspiring.

Then there was what might be dubbed the middle class intelligentsia, who raised their eyebrows at Thinktank’s interactive exhibits designed to make science interesting for children. It became a clever thing at dinner parties to ask: “What’s the Millennium Point?”

A better question would have been, where is Millennium Point? Positioned in the centre of the Eastside regeneration area, surrounded by derelict buildings and barren development sites, the wrong side of the inner ring road, Millennium Point was never easy to find and still isn’t today.

Even now, despite many attempts to improve pedestrian signs from New Street, Moor Street and the Bullring, a sound grasp of map reading is required for even the most intrepid walker.

Tellingly, just over 70 per cent of visitors to Thinktank and the IMAX cinema arrive by car or coach, although since a high proportion are school children this is perhaps unsurprising.

Millennium Point chief executive Dr Nick Winterbotham has heard all of the criticisms many times before, but appears to have the perfect rebuttal. The £114 million building, the largest millennium project outside London, is increasingly popular and making a profit.

It is 100 per cent let and has been for four years. As well as Thinktank and the IMAX, its tenants include Birmingham City University, Birmingham Metropolitan College, Marketing Birmingham, Sustainability West Midlands and property consultants Rider Levitt Bucknall.

More than a million people enter Millennium Point each year. About 2,500 people work there.

The rest are visitors to Thinktank and IMAX – which together welcomed 400,000 people last year.

“Millennium Point is doing exactly what it was supposed to do,” says Dr Winterbotham. ‘‘And that is to inform and educate through Thinktank, to provide a major visitor attraction and to spearhead regeneration in Eastside.

Dr Winterbotham admits that progress has not been as fast as he would have liked. If Millennium Point resembled a large shed in the middle of a huge building site 10 years ago, it still does today.