IN DAVID Lodge’s campus novel, Changing Places, the characters, English literature academics, play a game called Humiliation, where you score points by confessing the most embarrassing possible works of literature that you’ve never read. One of the academics loses his job after admitting, to win the game, that he hasn’t read Hamlet.

Well, as it says on the biography just to the right of this here screen, your current columnist is a “long-time resident of Greenwich.” Thirteen and a half years long, actually – six of them spent waiting for the 177 bus. But in my own personal Humiliation moment, let me, as a so-called SE10 expert, tell you the various deeply embarrassing Greenwich places I’ve never been, and cross my fingers they don’t sack me.

I’ve never been inside the Royal Observatory or the Cutty Sark, not since I moved here at least (I went on a school trip when I was 10.) Never been to Ranger’s House. Never been (shameful!) to the National Maritime Museum, not since it was refurbished yonks ago. Perhaps that isn’t too untypical of local residents in touristy areas. But there’s one other place which lots of locals visit and I never had: the 02.

I’d been when it was the Dome, just after Christmas 2000, about three days before it closed. But in a world containing, you know, Rome, Paris, and the Westfield Shopping Centre, never mind the National Maritime Museum, I never felt missing out on the 02 left a Hamlet-sized hole in my life. The fact that it is named after a mobile phone network was a bit of a clue that I might not like the place.

But last week, after someone was stabbed there, I thought: you know, why don’t I go and see what it’s like. And isn’t it a long way? It seemed to take about 20 minutes to cycle up the peninsula, and it was raining. That was the first test the 02 failed, actually – I couldn’t find anywhere nearby to park the bike. Various private security guards in yellow jackets hovered around as I tied it up to one of the struts of the building, half expecting it to be taken away by the time I got back. (Maybe you’ll tell me there are lovely cycle racks right next to the place: all I’ll say is I couldn’t find them.)

The fact that the 02 appears to have forgotten about bikes is one sign that this is now in many ways a relatively standard-issue out-of-town leisure warehouse, designed for the car – shiny ranks of which surrounded the place on all sides not taken up by water. Yes, I know there’s a tube station, and a riverbus, and I know the arena gets bigger names than the Royale Leisure Park, Western Avenue – but it’s still that kind of place.

There’s the usual slightly unfinished air, the usual grey surfaces, the usual big ugly spaces half-filled with escalators. There are the usual marketing men’s concept restaurants: Frankie & Benny’s, Slug & Lettuce, Zizzi, Ha Ha Bar & Grill, and so on, the great trophies of middle-market British industrial catering.

I especially like Frankie & Benny’s, which has a series of “New York Italian” diners in multiplex car parks across the land (I strongly suspect this chain has no current connection with New York, Italy or anyone named Frankie or Benny – it’s a division of The Restaurant Group.)

There are a couple of slightly more unusual chains, but none that really rises above the mediocre (based on my having eaten in their other branches.) There are also several outlets of my very favourite stealth chain, the Inc Group. I won’t describe them, for the sound reason that I haven’t eaten at any of them. There are, I think, no restaurants which are not chains.

There’s a cinema, where I went to see Oliver Stone’s film about George Bush, W. An appropriate movie in a place so American, perhaps. It is 65p cheaper than the Greenwich Picturehouse but does have that multiplex aroma of popcorn trodden into the carpets to make up. Inside the auditorium it looks unsurprisingly similar – dark room, oblong screen.

The one thing I didn’t see was the arena. Maybe I’ll go back and have a look at that sometime. You know what, they’ve got Barry Manilow next week. Elton John’s playing New Year’s Eve, for those with £99 to spare. In the meantime, I think I’ll head back to Nelson Road, where the number of empty shops – no doubt as a direct result of that piece I wrote last month – is about to fall by three-quarters. Hooray – life outside the multiplex goes on!

There are no windows at the 02, which is weirdly unsettling. It pays no heed at all to its surroundings; you’d never know there was a river, or indeed a city, outside. Even the swoop of the dome has been broken up by all the money-making bits they’ve put in.

I’m probably being snobbish about the 02. It is a considerable success in its new guise. But it’s not my kind of place, and only geographically is it part of Greenwich.