It was supposed to be a temporary attraction. But eight years on the London Eye has become a shining symbol of our capital city. Steve Rose explains why taking it down would now be unthinkable
Way back in the late 20th century, who could have guessed that what the capital needed more than anything else was a gigantic hi-tech bicycle wheel on the South Bank? But in less than a decade, the London Eye has become such an integral part of our capital city, it feels as if it has always been there - and as if it has always belonged there. It is difficult to remember what we did without it.
London is full of buildings that are admired and adored, but the Eye has achieved a different magnitude of success altogether. It is arguably the great architectural statement of our time. There are very few people who don't like the Eye. You can measure its success in figures and statistics. It is the most popular paid-for attraction in the country, it draws more than 3.5 million visitors a year and, in a recent survey by Trip Advisor, it came out as the top attraction in Europe, beating even the Eiffel Tower. Research carried out when it was re-applying for planning permission showed that support for the Eye, both in the local area and across London, stood at 85%.
And let's not forget that the London Eye was supposed to be a temporary structure. It was only tentatively given planning permission for the first five years after the millennium. Its future is now secure, in planning terms at least, for at least another 20 years, but it is likely to be there a great deal longer. Who would dare pull it down?
Yes, we love the London Eye, but why? Isn't it the sort of thing we're supposed to hate - the sort of incongruous, intrusive interruption our heritage-minded nation of naysayers and nimbyists is supposed to get up in arms about? Perhaps the Eye is a testament to Britain's contradictory relationship with its own tradition. We Britons cherish our crusty, useless rituals, our cumbersome history, but now and again there is nothing we enjoy more than flicking a V sign at it all. After all, we're the nation that invented punk rock.
Or maybe it is simply the way that this 135m-high ring of steel and glass sits right next to a World Heritage Site - the Palace of Westminster - and makes no concessions to the precious statues and stonework and spires around it. It doesn't even blend in with the brutalist concrete of the South Bank. But because it is so light and transparent, the contrast works. The Eye doesn't detract from its sensitive surroundings; instead it throws them into 21st-century relief. It doesn't spoil the view; it refreshes it and completes it. It is the landmark we never knew we needed.
The architect Terry Farrell recently told me a revealing story about London and its landmarks. In the 1980s, he was pitching to design a new airport in Korea, which, inevitably, his clients wanted to be "iconic" - the sort of thing that would put their city on the map. Farrell, who has produced his fair share of distinctive buildings in London, such as MI6's headquarters, the TV-AM building and Charing Cross station, showed the Koreans a random selection of postcards of buildings from around the world and asked them to name the city. Some were easy - the Sydney Opera House, the Eiffel Tower - but to his surprise, virtually nothing said "London" loud and clear. Buckingham Palace? That could be any European chateau. St Paul's? It's a big cathedral - is it in Rome? Big Ben? It could be in Antwerp. The only building that unmistakably said "London" was Tower Bridge. That was Britain's architectural ambassador: a fussy, lovably eccentric but essentially redundant relic of the steam age.
The Eye is not the only new, exciting piece of architecture in London - you could include the Gherkin, Tate Modern (just about), and a handful of others - but it's the one that makes the postcards these days. It's the one that now represents London, thank God. It announces to the world that Britain is not stuck in the past, that we're looking ahead, that we still have something to offer - as evidenced by its heavy inclusion in London's bid for the 2012 Olympics.
There's something else about the Eye, other than its being a delightful thing to look at - a surreal, kinetic sculpture, a universal expression of geometric purity, a continuation of Britain's engineering heritage, even a feminine counterbalance to the phallic urban skyline - that warms us to it. It's the fact that it does something. It is not there just to be looked at. It's also there to be looked from.
George Orwell, in Keep The Aspidistra Flying, likened a night-time cab ride in London to "being on the ocean bottom, among the luminous, gliding fishes". Similarly, in The Secret Agent, Joseph Conrad describes stepping out on to a wet London street as "like the descent into an aquarium". London is by and large a city of bottom dwellers. Only the privileged few - top-floor executives, wealthy patrons of high-rise hotels and restaurants, intrepid window cleaners - can rise above the coral reef. You could look in from the edges - from Parliament or Primrose Hill, say - but before the Eye, the highest public vantage point in the centre of London was the Golden Gallery at the top of St Paul's Cathedral. It is still a decent view, even if it is rapidly being hemmed in by new skyscrapers in the City, but as anyone who has wheezed and squeezed up its cramped staircases knows, it is only marginally more accessible than Everest base camp.
But thanks to the Eye, all of us, of all ages and abilities, locals and visitors, can see all of London, right to the city's limits and the countryside beyond. Words are redundant in describing the view itself, but it puts the whole city in perspective and gives us the power to take it in at a glance. It gives it new meaning and it redraws our mental map of it. And best of all, it is situated right across the Thames from the Palace of Westminster, Whitehall and Downing Street. Superficially, at least, in the Eye we can oversee our elected representatives.
Perhaps it is not really fair to compare the Eye with other works of architecture. That is not to say it isn't architecture (even though the judging panel for the 2001 Stirling prize famously decided it wasn't), more to acknowledge that it exists in a category of its own. After all, it essentially has to fulfil only one function, and what a brilliantly inessential function it is: to lift people up from the ground, take them round a giant loop in the sky, then put them back down where they started. That is all it needs to do, and thankfully, that is all it does. Architecture is invariably deployed in the service of political and personal agendas, even when it is pretending to be selfless and civic-minded, but the Eye is about as democratic as you can make a structure. It spins, but it is free of spin. It contains nothing. It preaches no message. Instead, it gives London back to us.
The unlikely story of how the London Eye came to be built.
The London Eye might never have been built, had it not lost the competition it was designed for. In 1993, an article in the Sunday Times invited readers to "design a monument for the dawn of a new era". It caught the attention of husband-and-wife team David Marks and Julia Barfield, who had recently established their own practice, having previously worked with both Richard Rogers and Norman Foster. But the construction business was in no way booming and, imagining that the competition might at least raise their profile, they quickly arrived on the idea of an updated Ferris wheel - an appropriate symbol to mark the occasion, and a fun trip for visitors. They submitted their entry and awaited the results.