Wales Millennium Centre (Welsh: Canolfan Mileniwm Cymru) is Wales's national arts centre located in the Cardiff Bay area of Cardiff, Wales. The site covers a total area of 7.5 acres (3.0 ha).
- Venue
- Wales Millennium Centre
- Town
- Cardiff, GB
- Capacity
- 1,897
Wales Millennium Centre (Welsh: Canolfan Mileniwm Cymru) is Wales's national arts centre located in the Cardiff Bay area of Cardiff, Wales. The site covers a total area of 7.5 acres (3.0 ha). Phase 1 of the building was opened during the weekend of 26-28 November 2004 and phase 2 opened on 22 January 2009 with an inaugural concert. The centre is Cardiff's principal receiving venue for large-scale opera, ballet, contemporary dance and musicals. It comprises a large theatre and a smaller hall with a shop, bars and a café. It houses the BBC National Orchestra and Chorus of Wales and opera, dance, theatre and literature companies, with a total of eight arts organisations in residence. In 2012 the Centre announced that it would also be a producing company. Its productions across the genres have been performed in London, Edinburgh and Australia. In 2021 and 2024 it was in co-production with the Royal National Theatre. The main theatre, the Donald Gordon Theatre, has 1,896 seats, and is the second-largest stage in Europe. The BBC Hoddinott Hall seats 350 and the Weston Studio Theatre seats 250. In 2001 Lord Rowe-Beddoe was appointed chair of Wales Millennium Centre, a company limited by guarantee. Peter Swinburn is the current chair of Wales Millennium Centre. Wales Millennium Centre replaced an earlier project for the site, the Cardiff Bay Opera House, a plan supported by the Cardiff Bay Development Corporation to construct a permanent home for the Welsh National Opera. An international design competition attracted 268 international applicants, and was won by Iraq-born architect Zaha Hadid. Her avant-garde design was so radical that she and a selection of other applicants were asked to submit revised designs for a second round of competition-which she again won with "a sleek and dazzling complex of sharp lines and surfaces that she compared to an 'inverted necklace'". In December 1995 the Millennium Commission, the body which distributed funds from the UK National Lottery