‘The Millennium Dome was insulted daily’: the ‘horrible Frenchman’ who saved Blair’s ‘tent’

Pierre-Yves Gerbeau is twice the man he used to be when he was parachuted in to rescue the Millennium Dome back in 2000. Ruefully, the spiky-haired Frenchman smiles and pats his soft navy gilet, its badge a reminder of his days as an international ice hockey player. “I wear the gilet because it hides a bit of the belly,” he says. “The problem is that I work like a dog and I can’t exercise. But I can’t fight all the fights.”

At the moment, Gerbeau (“the Gerbil”, as he was dubbed by the British press) is engaged in the most ambitious fight of his career – turning an industrial wasteland on the Thames Estuary in Kent into a global leisure destination by 2024. The walls of his new offices in Mayfair are decorated with images of transformation. At a rough cost of £3.5 billion, more than 1,000 acres of the Swanscombe Peninsula will be turned into a mecca for thrill-seekers. A key boast is that the resort will be the first carbon-neutral theme park anywhere.

What is holding things up a little is the rare distinguished jumping spider (atullus distinguendus), discovered in 2003 and now protected, along with fellow rarities such as the brown-banded carder bee and the tentacled lagoon worm, because the marshes have just been designated a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) by Natural England. What are a few more weeks of fine-tuning his plan to meet Natural England’s concerns and ensure these humble creatures are accorded proper respect?

PY, as he’s known, is unruffled. As chief executive of The London Resort, he has already set aside £150 million to enhance the habitat and create eight miles of footpaths and public rights of way. He has presented an application for development to the Secretary of State running to 25,000 pages. 

“Since I arrived two years ago we have had four independent eco-surveys,” says Gerbeau, “and we’re not talking eco-warriors, we’re talking proper ecologists. They couldn’t find any jumping spiders, not one. If we find any endangered species on site, we will stop construction and move them. The spiders might hold us up – if we find them – but it will be in a good cause.”

What frustrates him, he says, is how the environmental lobby treats this polluted and rather sorry-looking piece of land as if it were the Amazon rainforest. “Honestly!” he huffs. “I’m not saying it’s glowing in the dark but it’s not pretty. The marshes could be so much better. I am not taking away a beautiful part of Cornwall.” With typical chutzpah, he predicts that the former quarry and landfill site could become “the most attractive place in Kent, if not the UK”.

The Swanscombe project, first known as The London Paramount Entertainment Resort, was announced seven years ago but ran into financial difficulties. A lost cause of the kind PY relishes. “Usually we take everything that was done before, put it in the garbage and start afresh,” he says. “I’m not here to trash the past, but they didn’t have the expertise. You don’t ask a banker to run a leisure operation, any more than you’d ask me to run the Dyson factories.”

If the planning inquiry goes in London Resort’s favour, Gerbeau will be running the most ambitious leisure operation in Europe – a project funded so far by Kuwaiti European Holdings and into which he has sunk some of his own money. Post-Covid, and with an uncertain travel market, no one knows what to expect but he is optimistic. “We know how to operate monsters like this, but we are in a new world and we need to be flexible.”

PY is a Parisian exile. He’s lived in London for more than two decades and has an English wife, the television presenter Kate Sanderson, but he likes to lampoon himself as a “horrible, loud, fat Frenchman” in the eyes of the restrained British. It goes back to his days at the Dome (now the 02 Arena) when a sceptical press called him “the mysterious Mr Nobody” despite an impressive track record at Euro Disney. More wounding, it was suggested that PY, then 34, had been appointed by mistake for someone older and more experienced with the same name.

He took the personal slights badly and they still rankle. “The difficulty at the Dome was not the turnaround itself,” he says, “but it was getting insulted on a daily basis. The worst thing was being slaughtered twice a week by John Humphrys [on the Today programme].”

When Gerbeau arrived in February 2000, Tony Blair’s predicted 12 million visitors seemed pure pie-in-the-sky. “How the hell was a tent with no proper attractions or track record in the middle of nowhere supposed to do that? It was never going to happen.”

Politicians tried to blame him for their own ineptitude. “I was the scapegoat, no question.” His only ally, he says, was the Cabinet Office Minister Mo Mowlam [she died in 2005 aged 55] who would take him for a consoling tea at The Ritz. At the mention of her, he becomes emotional. “My hero. She saved my life multiple times, bless her soul.”  

Gerbeau cut ticket prices and queues, introduced travel packages and beefed up the shows. By the end of the year, its allotted span, the Dome had been visited by 6.5 million and was pulling in more people than Alton Towers. He says it took him three months to recover from exhaustion.  

For his next gig he took on a failing ski centre in Milton Keynes and from it created X-Leisure, with 19 leisure parks. It made him a wealthy man. In all, he has turned around nine failing enterprises. What excites him about The London Resort, though, is that he will be staying around to run it. “Usually you fix it and then you are very kindly asked to disappear,” he says. “You know why? Because people say: ‘That horrible Frenchman is still there.’

“I love running things. My life will start at the end of 2024 when we open the park. We are trying to bring something incredible to people, especially in these difficult times.” A second park is due to open there in 2029. Last month, details were announced of a prehistoric nature reserve dedicated to dinosaurs, adventure and an active dig site for would-be palaeontologists.  

An entrance ticket for a day packed with “experiences” could cost £70. And, with the Dome’s embarrassing hype in mind, Gerbeau sets a modest target of four million visitors in the first year.  

PY is 55 now, still boyishly ebullient. What attracts him to missions impossible? “I’m vertically challenged, right? I’m a gnome. I’m a midget. (Not exactly; he is 5ft 8in.) My attitude is that of the little man who wants to prove himself.” After his coach at the under-12 ice hockey team in France dismissed him as too small to make it, Gerbeau took his first senior national team shirt and stapled it to the door of his office.

He’s still working ridiculous hours. After a long week, he says, “I might have a good cigar, on my own, on my back patio. Cigars are associated with fat cats, so I hide.” Home, with his wife and 13-year-old daughter Chloe, is a converted library in Battersea. His 24-year-old daughter Clemence by his early first marriage is finishing her masters in criminology in Brussels.

When our time is up, though clearly in pain from a recent motorcycle accident, he edges round a long conference table to conduct me to the lift. “I am in the best business in the world,” he sums up. “I am paid to make people happy. This project will be the pinnacle for me. After that, hopefully, I won’t have to work for a living any more.”