LONDON may well have its Millennium Dome, but one Hampshire school has proved you don't have to run up a £758 million bill to mark the dawn of the 21st century.

Excluding the cost of a bag or two of cement, the total for this piece of artwork, entitled Our Pebble Mosaic, ran to the somewhat modest sum of £17.

More than 300 pebbles - each one painstakingly paint-ed by artists ranging in age-from four to 60-plus - have been laid in a circle in concrete to celebrate the turn of the century in 186 days time.

Every single person in the school, from the children to the cleaners and the teachers and governors, took part in the project in a bid to capture for posterity life in our ponds and seas.

Each crafted pebble, which had been coloured in with classroom paint and then varnished, was yesterday inset in wet cement by caretaker Malcolm Barstow around the playground sundial.

The idea of the pebble mosaic was hatched by staff at St Monica Infants School in Bay Road, Sholing, Southampton, which is 125 years old and has 269 pupils on its roll.

Jo Mumford, the teacher co-ordinating the project, said: "Generations of children in the future will be able to look at the work - it will be there forever.''

Youngsters aged four and five drew their inspiration for their drawings from visits to the school pond, focusing on such things as frogs, frog spawn and newts.

Those pupils aged from five to seven concentrated on animals living in the sea, like whales, octupuses and dolphins, with the adults pitching in as well.

Miss Mumford, 26, added: "Some of the youngsters know the animals are in danger. They know they have to be careful and that people should not hurt them.''

As for the next millenni-um task, it's one the delighted infants can get even more stuck into - making hand-prints in wet cement on a school wall.

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