The site sits on the southern banks of the River Thames, about one mile upstream (west) from the Thames Barrier and immediately south of the dome that became the O2. East Greenwich Gas Works had occupied the peninsula since the late nineteenth century - a vast industrial operation that ringed London with coal-derived town gas and left the peninsula thoroughly polluted. By the 1990s the site was effectively a contamination problem looking for a development solution. The Greenwich Peninsula regeneration, of which Millennium Village was one element, was the largest brownfield project in Europe at the time. Adjacent to the village, the Greenwich Peninsula Ecology Park was created on what had been industrial wasteland - a small, deliberate wetland that now supports kingfishers, dragonflies, and the kind of wildlife that nobody would have associated with this stretch of the Thames a generation ago.

Ralph Erskine, who had spent most of his career in Sweden, brought a Scandinavian sensibility to the master plan. Erskine partnered with EPR Architects Ltd as executive architect. The development was funded under the Millennium Communities Programme through English Partnerships (now renamed Homes and Communities Agency). The targets were specific and ambitious: primary energy use cut by 80% using low-energy building techniques and renewable energy technologies. About 20% of the units completed are affordable housing, owned by a housing association which rents to those in social need and to key workers under shared ownership rent-to-buy purchase schemes. By 2010, 1,098 flats and houses had been built, along with a village square with shops, a primary school, and a GP surgery. The development was being delivered by a consortium of Countryside Properties and Taylor Wimpey, with completion of the full village planned for around 2015. Some early residents complained, in 2005, that the noise insulation in the Kilby Court blocks was inadequate - one of the small but real friction points of putting people into experimental architecture and then expecting them to live in it like everyone else.

The transport links woven into the village were as much a part of the plan as the buildings themselves. North Greenwich station on the Jubilee line, opened for the dome in 1999, is the nearest tube. London buses fan out from there - routes 108, 129, 132, 161, 180, 188, 335, 422, 472, and 486 all serve the area. Charlton and Westcombe Park railway stations connect to Dartford, London Cannon Street, and London Charing Cross via Southeastern services. The North Greenwich pier handles Thames Clippers boats to Embankment, central Greenwich, and Woolwich Arsenal. In June 2012 the London Cable Car opened, connecting North Greenwich with the Royal Docks across the river - its southern terminal sits just north of the village, on Edmund Halley Way. For a small modern neighbourhood, the multi-modal transport saturation is unusual - reflective of the millennium-era ambition to make urban villages dense, walkable, and connected to the rest of the city by something other than the car.

Filmmakers found the development photogenic almost immediately. Lady Leshurr filmed the video for Queen's Speech Ep.4 here. The 2006 BBC One ident Windows - the one where residents seemed to use their windows to reflect sunlight into a ring - was filmed at Greenwich Millennium Village under director Matthias Hoene; it ran until 2008 to introduce daytime programming. Visually the village has the slightly impossible feel that flagship developments often do: too colourful for English understatement, too small for grand statement, but it is intentional. The buildings step around courtyards, with footpaths threading through, and the village square has the kind of cafe culture that London estate planners had been trying to import since the postwar era. Whether the village succeeded as a model is a question reasonable people answer differently. Energy targets were largely met. Affordable housing got built. People moved in, and stayed, and complained about noise insulation. A school, a doctor, shops, transport. Twenty-five years after the project was conceived, it has become what its planners hoped: an unremarkable neighbourhood. That, on what was once a contaminated gas works, is its own quiet kind of success.