On Monday July 14 I will be in Portland to give the people who live and work on the island – and anyone else interested a chance to hear about how the Jurassica Project is progressing. I am fully aware that expectations are high, much speculation is in the air and that also, as yet, work has not commenced to build this extraordinary vision. This is a chance to say what has – and has not – been achieved, and what you can expect to see happening in the near future.
For those of you unaware of Jurassica, it is an ambitious plan to sculpt an extraordinary showcase for the Jurassic Coast, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The Jurassic Coast is one of the places where modern thinking can be said to have begun; the fossil discoveries being made there by Mary Anning and others paving the way for the work of Charles Darwin and the founders of geology and biology as we know these sciences today.
The idea is quite simple: we plan to take a large and deep hole in the ground, an old limestone quarry on Portland, put a glass and steel lid on it – and then fill it with wonderful things.
What sort of things? Fossils of the weird and wonderful prehistoric animals that once graced the seas and mudflats that became the rocks of Dorset. Robot plesiosaurs and other animatronics that will swim in a real aquarium. A chance for visitors to walk back through time and take in hundreds of millions of years of Earth’s most interesting chunk of history, the age of the dinosaurs and plesiosaurs, the pterosaurs and ammonites. Want to see what a live ammonite looked like swimming through the sea? Come to Jurassica.
We have heavyweight backers, including Sir David Attenborough, our patron, and a stellar team of trustees headed by Sir Tim Smit, who created the Eden Project. The world’s finest architect, Renzo Piano, is designing the structure, and the world’s finest engineering firm, Arup, will make it happen.
Who is going to pay for all this? After all, we are looking for upwards of sixty million pounds. We have to buy the land, pay the designers and engineers, make one of the largest roofs in the world and create a site of world-class beauty and interest. None of this comes cheap.
We are looking for a mix of public and private money, and we have a detailed fundraising strategy in place and thanks to the unparalleled contacts and resources of our trustees – and of course the stardust supplied by Sir David, who is taking a very active role despite his ludicrous volume of commitments – we are wholly confident that we will get our money. It is a great deal of cash but, as I realised in one startled moment last year, it is actually rather less than you can pay for a single flat in one of the posher parts of London.
Jurassica is a charitable trust and profits will be ploughed back into the charity. It will bring in a great deal of money for Dorset, and draw attention and investment directly into Weymouth and Portland. In Cornwall, the Eden Project has almost single-handedly transformed the tourist economy of the county, bringing in an estimated one and a half billion pounds to Cornwall’s collective coffers since it opened 13 years ago. We have calculated that Jurassica will, similarly, pump several tens of millions of pounds annually into Dorset’s cash-registers – good news for hotel and guest house owners, restaurateurs, food suppliers, taxi drivers and so forth. In short, we will have the regenerative effect promised by the 2012 Olympics that sadly, for the most part, failed to materialise.
We will award contracts, where possible and where the law allows, to local suppliers and to train local people – and we know this is an area of very high unemployment – to do the highly-skilled work that running a major tourist attraction involves. We will need cooks and cleaners, engineers and technicians, public relations officers, marketing experts, curators, managers and scientists. As with Eden we plan to do as much as we can ‘in house’, from management to catering and cleaning. We will provide upwards of 190 full-time properly skilled jobs with decent wages for local people on the island and on the nearby mainland. Of course there will be many more jobs than this during the construction phase, which we believe will last around 30-40 months.
Will this happen? Yes. Of course, nothing in this life is certain. Many obstacles lie ahead, and not just the money. But some of the finest and most sceptical minds in the world when it comes to creating projects like this have been scrutinising the plans from all angles for more than three years now and Renzo Piano and the rest have kept the faith. I have to share their confidence otherwise I would not only be letting them down, but Portland down as well.
Come and see the plans (we may even have some 3D models to show you hot from Renzo’s workshop in Paris) and ask as many hard questions as you can. We do not want an easy ride; far from it. Scepticism is healthy, difficult questions are the best ones to be asked. You may be worried about the impact on traffic, or on the environment. Will Jurassica be an eyesore? What if no one comes? Will you end up having to pay for it? We want to hear what you have to say. This is your island, not mine, and above all else I want Jurassica to make Portland a better place.
– Michael Hanlon
– Chief Executive Jurassica
Save the Date JURASSICA Community Presentation 7pm July 14th 2014
Girt Hall, St George’s Centre, Reforne, Portland, DT5 2AN
Michael Hanlon
