There's a new expression you see on the faces of visitors to London at the moment - heads craning upwards, jaws dropping downwards. The tourists who come to Covent Garden for the cafes and craft stalls and clothes shops find themselves cheek by jowl with the biggest and by far the most contentious of the lottery-funded cultural rebuilding projects. And they stand and stare at it. Rightly: this one is going to be good.
It feels like Mitterrand's Paris in the 1980s. Surely, they must think, some great royal or governmental edict is taking effect? A huge new opera house, value £214m, is taking shape. The long-missing corner of the Covent Garden arcade is finally being completed as part of the process. A colossal new fly tower has shot skywards. A Victorian cast-iron glasshouse has been restored and moved alongside the familiar portico. Mysterious modernist stone-clad buildings have sprung up to fill the surrounding streetscape.
It is just possible now, picking your way through the huge clanging shipyard that the opera house project resembles, to get a feel for the place when it opens in December 1999. The wraps are starting to come off, the scale is becoming apparent. I duck in under the portico with Jeremy Dixon and Ed Jones, the architects whose firm, Dixon Jones BDP, has worked on the scheme for a soberingly long time (the original competition for the project was back in 1984). The old entrance hall and grand stair are still there, but now you have the option of stepping out off the half-landing into the enormous new foyer in the revamped conservatory made from bits of the old Floral Hall. This was previously a scenery store that has been moved and given back the barrel-vaulted roof it lost in a fire in 1956. If you come in from the other side, via a new entrance in the restored corner of the Covent Garden Piazza, you'll find yourself here, too.
The Floral Hall foyer is big enough for an entire audience to mill around with ease, but they will have other options. From here you can descend to the new 400-seat subterranean Studio Theatre, or rise up escalators behind a glass wall to the equally new, high-level amphitheatre foyer above. Those up in the "gods" used to be third-class citizens, but not any more. The amphitheatre now opens onto an open rooftop loggia, running round the corner of the piazza, that makes it, if anything, more desirable than the traditionally coveted seats down below in the stalls.
We arrive in the top of the auditorium, where protective cloths have just been removed from the familiar saucer-dome of the ceiling, now pristine again. The plaster angels are being regilded, the seating re-angled for a better view. The boxes - previously skewed towards the audience - will be turned towards the stage. This is relatively subtle stuff: everyone agrees that while E M Barry's 1858 theatre is at best a journeyman piece of classicism, it has a fine and resonant auditorium that needs the lightest of modernising touches. But elsewhere - behind, alongside, above and below Barry's sacred space - most of what you see is new, even if it doesn't seem to be.
