The londone eye at dusk, as can be seen at 25: London Eye (London Eye)
The first passengers to get into the London eye on Sunday morning can be excused because they treat themselves to 62 GBP per capet in the sky in the sky package -despite the 10 o’clock start.
Because if you reach the top hour of revolution and look down from 443 feet to this extraordinary view that extends to the Windsor Castle on a good day, you can rightly celebrate.
A structure that was built to commemorate the new millennium and is only planned as a temporary attraction that has dropped after five years after five years celebrates its 25th birthday on March 9.
For a quarter of a century, it is hardly conceivable that London’s skyline without the large steel circle, spoke its slim and protrude his 32 pods across the Südbank.
The eye – or the millennium bike, as it was known in the early days – was last year that the planning obligation stayed in the long run at its location opposite the Westminster Pier.
With regular maintenance, there is no reason why it shouldn’t take at least another 25 years – and beyond.
Julia Barfield, half of the husband and wife’s architect team, who designed it, refers to Vienna’s huge Ferris wheel British, which has been strong since 1897.
At the time of its silver anniversary, the London Eye will have worn 85 million passengers – roughly the completely population of Germany. The owners, the Madame Tussauds to Legoland Attractions Group Merlin Entertainments, are a bit shy at how much money it needed during this time. But since tickets from £ 29 and many visitors who pay for the broods in the pod packages, it is fair to say that the total revenue must be far beyond the £ 1.5 billion mark – and probably closer to £ 2 billion.
As part of his planning obligation, 1% of them must be donated to local community organizations – perhaps up to £ 20 million in a quarter of a century.
Robin Goodchild Senior General Manager of London Eye will not say how much it deserves for the company, except that it was very profitable.
The eye is now the most popular for the attraction with an average of 3.5 million people who start every year. This is slightly due to the 4.5 million highlight in the Olympic year 2012, but still a deeply impressive number.
On a strenuous day in the school holidays, up to 16,000 people per day will step on board this distinctive pod, in a calm in the depths of winter, perhaps only 5,000, but in the year, in which around 10,000 passengers, including the prince and the princess of Wales, Kate Mos and Kim Kardashian, are around 10,000 on average. Only 11 people stood in a pod at the head of the revolution – including Sir Geoff Hurst, Mo Farah and Great Britain decorated Olympic couple, cyclist Laura and Jason Kenny
To commemorate the landmark, the owners of the Eyes commissioned a short film “Turn 25: London’s Eye”, in which celebrities like the actors Russell Tovey and David Harewood, singer Leigh-Anne Pinnock and the Ukrainian boxing champion Oleksandr Usyk about what the landmark means with them. It also shows an original piece of spoken word poems by London Performance Poet Emmanuel. The film can watch on the YouTube channel from London Eye.
The Londoners take it for granted now, but the eye is a technical miracle that needed the top Pan-European teamwork to build it up and turn it.
The original Lead Engineers Mitsubishi failed in 1998 with Marks and Barfield. They wanted to make enormous costs for the cost reduction of the design, which the architects could not agree.
This included the replacement of the characteristic bent glass with a flat glass and the replacement of the English oak soils with “another cheaper material”.
The architects then turned to the Dutch contractors Hollandia, after they were impressed by the movable flood barriers that the company had built at the mouth of the Rhine.
Jan Stam, the Hollandia installation manager responsible for the London Eye Project, remembers that they were bought in “at last minute” in 1998, the clock approaching until the hard time of the millennium.
The standard supported the London eye from the start from the start (Jonathan Prynn)
He remembers that he was brought to the website for the first time and thought: “Anyone who has decided on earth to build a bike here. At that time it was a very run -down area with many homeless people who wander around, and the Imax cinema, the only finished building nearby. “
The company made the border of the bike of four huge pieces of steel, each with 300 tons. They were swimming from Holland to Thames mouth on the load barge and brought through the Tower Bridge.
The London Eye was the heart of the New Year’s celebrations throughout the 21st century (London Eye)
Stam remembers the “intensive calculations” that had to be made to make the structures low at one point in the flood in order to get under the structure, but not so low that the load barges were on the river bed.
Once on the summer of 1999 at the location, the huge pieces of steel on four temporary islands were rested in the Thames and the wheel was assembled with the central Czech spindle, which lay flat over the river.
As Stam says: “It was definitely nerve -wracking, everyone was very, very emotionally involved, but also very proud to participate. Everyone on the website had a large load on their shoulders, there were inevitably some curse and screams, but overall the mood on site was really amazing. We all wanted to build it up. There was a little stress, but it was good stress, healthy stress. “
Unfortunately the first attempt to put the structure in position on October 9
A quarter of a century on Stam is still immense satisfaction of performance. When I am in the area and drive over the Westminster Bridge, it is always full of tourists who take photos of Big Ben on one side and on the other. The feeling that I am partly responsible for this wheel is really pretty good. “
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