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THE FIRST THING to say about the London Eye is that it's new and big. This in itself is a new and big idea. Since the heyday of Christopher Wren, London hasn't really done much big. It's done sprawl but it hasn't done high. It might be a world leader in sprawl but, in terms of height, it's down there with the lowest of the low. Apart from the financial district (known, confusingly, as the City) and some recent developments over in Docklands, most buildings level out at under a hundred feet. It's a horizontal city, easily compatible with low cloud, and an abundance of local airports. The Eye -- a Ferris wheel, essentially -- is vertical, poised next to the river, the flattest, lowest, most horizontal part of this low, flat, horizontal city. The Thames is old, sluggish, and bored, the way all the great rivers end up; the Eye looms over it: big, fun, and new as anything (it was up but not quite running in time for millennium eve). Musil said there was nothing more invisible than a monument but the Eye is stunningly visible. Each time you glimpse it you think (historically speaking), "Shit, that wasn't there yesterday!" But there it is: a huge bicycle wheel, specifically a racing-bike wheel: slim, elegant, fragile. It's held in place only on one side, by an A-frame, so that it's suspended precariously over the river like a fan poised to blow air through the city. The Eye is located on the south side of the Thames, near Waterloo. The station here was recently revamped to accommodate the Eurostar, which comes screaming out of France at the speed of light and then has to crawl through the quaint countryside of Kent. Welcome to Britain, land of disappointment! But once the train has completed its trudge through southeast England, you disembark at Waterloo, emerge into the rain, and see the Eye: corporate logo (it's official title is the British Airways London Eye) of Cool Britannia, of a bold, new, future-oriented London. Between it and Waterloo is the once-radiant -- now slightly bedrizzled -- modernism of the South Bank Centre (the Hayward Gallery, Royal Festival Hall). From the walkways here you can trompe l'oeil yourself into thinking that the concave, inner rim of the far part of the wheel is the convex outer rim of the near part of the wheel. The idea of the vanishing point itself vanishes. Not only does the wheel apparently turn itself inside out like this, it seems also to tilt wildly. It's as if the physics and engineering of the operation are more complex than the laws of perspective and perception can accommodate. The wheel turns at the speed of the slow-moving Thames, so slowly as to seem hardly to move at all, slowly enough to enable you to step into your viewing capsule while it's in motion -- which it is, all the time. A complete rotation lasts half an hour. The capsules have room for 25 people and are on the outside of the wheel, adding to that spectacular sense of the impossibly precarious. You glide upward, noiselessly, the capsules rotating as the wheel turns so that your experience of this entirely vertical phenomenon is constantly horizontal. We are talking, in every sense, about a 360-degree experience. You get 360-degree views of London, obviously, but the Eye also provides excellent, constantly changing views of that spectacular 360-degree construction, namely itself. (In this respect, it is utterly different from the Eiffel Tower, where one of those French cats -- I can't remember which -- took lunch every day because, he said, it was the one place in Paris from which you could avoid seeing the Eiffel Tower.) Up close like this, you see the constructivist aspect of the wheel, the tensile might of the apparently skimpy spokes and spars. You pull clear of the water, very slowly, but very soon you are at cruising altitude, up above the world -- or up above lowly London anyway. "Earth has not anything to show more fair": Wordsworth's strap line adorns the entrance to the Eye but this is a fantastically outdated claim. The Eye is great, the Eye is cool, but, architecturally speaking, "the world's greatest city" -- as the British are constantly and absurdly calling it -- is surely one of the least impressive in Europe. In the foreground, just across the river, you have the establishing shot of Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament, including the new extension (the dreariest piece of modern heritage imaginable, the exact opposite of the millennial daring of the Eye). You can see the busy bridges and the muddy river and the Blitz-defying dome of St. Paul's, you can see cranes (omens of the as-yet-unbuilt), you can see... Well, there are landmarks in all directions, of course, but what is striking is how difficult it is to pick out the so-called sights from the enveloping mass. Most of the city -- especially if you look south -- is just this undifferentiated extent of concrete sprawl. There's none of that vertiginous rush you get from the Empire State Building. There's just the dull flatness of the river carving up the dull beige of the endless cab-and-bus-crowded streets, the endless homes where dinners are eaten, beds slept in and TVs -- like the city from the Eye -- watched. Geoff Dyer is the author of "But Beautiful," "Out of Sheer Rage," and "Paris Trance." He lives in London. Share your thoughts on the grandeur and squalor of cities, and on Feed's "Street Level" special city issue, in the Loop. |
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