The wheel's name has changed five times since it opened, and it is at present the lastminute.com London Eye — the sponsor's name only, since Merlin Entertainments has owned it outright since 2007. It stopped being the world's tallest observation wheel in 2006 and is now roughly seventh; it stopped being London's highest public viewpoint in 2013. What has not changed is the engineering, which is the genuinely unusual part: it is cantilevered, held up on one side only, and its capsules ride on the outside of the rim rather than hanging below it.
What it is called
Any account of the wheel that names its sponsor will date, because the sponsor has changed repeatedly. It was the British Airways London Eye from 2000 until January 2008, then plain the London Eye for eighteen months, then the Merlin Entertainments London Eye, then the EDF Energy London Eye from 2011, then the Coca-Cola London Eye from 2015, and the lastminute.com London Eye since 2020. The constant is the owner. Ownership was split three ways at the start, between British Airways, the architects and the Tussauds Group; British Airways sold out in 2005 and the architects in 2006, and Tussauds was absorbed into Merlin Entertainments in 2007. Merlin has held it since, and the sponsors' names are naming rights and nothing more.
Who designed it
It was conceived and led by David Marks and Julia Barfield of Marks Barfield Architects, who entered it for a competition for a millennium landmark that produced no winner and then built it anyway. Marks died in 2017. The wider design team is properly credited too — eight other named designers worked on it — and the structural engineering was by Arup, where the concept engineer was Jane Wernick. It won the Institution of Structural Engineers' special award in 2001.
How it stands up
It is a cantilevered observation wheel, and that is the right description rather than Ferris wheel, which reliable sources also use but which obscures what is unusual about it. A Ferris wheel is supported on both sides. This one is held by an A-frame on one side only, so that the whole structure, some sixteen hundred tonnes of it, is carried off the bank of the river with nothing on the water side.
The consequences run through the design. The rim is not a solid wheel but an open triangular truss made of sixty-four straight welded sections, held in permanent compression by sixty-four prestressed cables acting as spokes — a bicycle wheel at a scale of a hundred and twenty metres. Sixty-four mass dampers on the rim limit movement in wind. The capsules are mounted on rings that run round the outside of the rim rather than slung underneath it, which is why nothing interrupts the view, and each has a motorised levelling system governed by an inclinometer, with the components duplicated. A laser watches for a seizing hub bearing. The loading figures are counter-intuitive: a storm nearly doubles the overturning force on the structure, while the passengers account for about two per cent of it.
It stands a hundred and thirty-five metres high with a wheel a hundred and twenty metres across, and carries thirty-two sealed capsules, numbered one to thirty-three with no number thirteen, one nominally for each London borough. Each holds twenty-five people, not the twenty of older accounts, and a revolution takes about half an hour at a walking pace of some twenty-six centimetres a second — slow enough that it does not normally stop to load.
Raising it, and opening it
The lift did not go smoothly. A first attempt in early September 1999 was abandoned when several of the cables failed during a proof test. The successful lift ran over a weekend that October, raising the wheel from the horizontal in two stages across two days and finishing in the small hours of the Monday morning.
Three opening dates get run together. It was opened ceremonially on 31 December 1999 by the Prime Minister. The first passengers rode free on 1 February 2000. And it opened to paying visitors on 9 March 2000, the delay caused by a fault in a capsule clutch.
The record it no longer holds
It was the world's tallest wheel of its kind for six years. A wheel at Nanchang passed it in 2006, the Singapore Flyer in 2008, a wheel in Las Vegas in 2014, and one in Dubai, at nearly twice the height, in 2021; two more in China and Russia are also taller. It is now somewhere around seventh. Accounts still calling it the largest in the world have been wrong for twenty years. It also ceased to be the highest public viewpoint in London in 2013, when the viewing floors at the top of the Shard opened at nearly twice the altitude.
The lease, and the permission
Two separate arrangements govern whether it stays, and older accounts confuse the state of both.
The ground it stands on is a sliver of Jubilee Gardens under one leg. In May 2005 the landlord served notice and sought a much higher rent, the Mayor threatened compulsory purchase, and the dispute was settled in February 2006 with a new twenty-five-year lease at a rent set as a percentage of turnover against a guaranteed minimum. Nothing has been published about it since.
Planning permission was the more consequential question. The consent granted in 2003 required the wheel to be taken down after twenty-five years unless the council decided otherwise, which put its removal in prospect for 2028. The operator applied to have that condition discharged, and in May 2024 the local authority's planning committee voted unanimously to do so. The wheel now has permanent consent with no expiry date, with an agreement committing one per cent of annual turnover to local investment. One condition attached to it concerns the Environment Agency's intention to raise the river wall alongside under its long-term Thames flood strategy.
What is around it
The aquarium next door in County Hall is the Sea Life London Aquarium, which Merlin also bought, in 2008, so the two attractions are now stablemates rather than neighbours. The wheel's own four-dimensional cinema, a short film shown in County Hall, opened in 2009. The large-format cinema a few minutes away on the Waterloo roundabout is the BFI IMAX, which the British Film Institute took back into its own hands in 2022 and reopened after a thorough upgrade.
Two things older accounts put here are long gone. The Saatchi Gallery was at County Hall only from 2003 until October 2005, when the High Court upheld its landlord's forfeiture claim, and it reopened in Chelsea in 2008. And the Millennium Dome has been the O2 since 2007, operating as an arena and concert venue rather than looking for a purpose.
What can be seen, and getting there
Reference accounts of the view name the Houses of Parliament, Westminster Abbey and Buckingham Palace. The familiar claim about seeing as far as Windsor Castle on a clear day comes from the attraction's own marketing and from ticket resellers, and no independent source supports a distance figure, so none is given here.
Waterloo, which serves both the Underground and the main line, is the usual advice and a sound one. Westminster is arguably closer as the crow flies, just over Westminster Bridge, and Embankment and Charing Cross are an easy walk across the river. River boats call at the pier beside it.
The wheel has been lit by a controllable colour system since 2006, which is what allows the liveries and commemorative lightings it now does regularly. The capsules were taken off one at a time from 2009, floated down the river to Tilbury and refitted, work timed to finish before the 2012 Olympics.
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