P eople in London are used to traffic circles ("roundabouts"), they're an everyday annoyance. This one, however, is different. In the center is a massive IMAX movie theater. The building rises out of the pavement like a giant glass gas storage tank. The massive glass walls allow people outside to see designs on the inside, and allow people inside to see the city moving around it. This is a change for what is essentially an oversized high-tech movie house: People looking outward, rather than inward. It's just one way the building integrates itself with the neighborhood. Before this development, it was a burned out urban core. Within months of the theater opening, there was a renewed vibrancy, and the start of urban renewal. This was due, in no small part, to the fact that each homeless person who used to live at the site was given a new home.
11 June, 1999: The Prince of Wales officially opens the theater.
