Visiting the i360 tower

2 minute read

The British Airways i360 is touted as the world’s first vertical cable car, the world’s thinnest tower and the world’s tallest moving observation tower. Our interest was piqued by this set of showy superlatives, so we decided to take a trip to Brighton to find out a little more about the design and engineering of this structural complexity.

Conceived by Marks Barfield Architects who designed the London Eye, the 162 metre tall tower stands rather incongruously on Brighton’s seafront, where it dominates the promenade. As well as having a striking figure, its design and build process has struck the industry due to its highly technical execution.

Six months of planning work went into deciding how the structure would be built, which then took 10 weeks to construct. 3 metre deep foundations lay at the bottom of the i360, which is formed from 17 steel ‘cans’ shipped over to Brighton Seafront on a barge from the Netherlands. The 18m diameter pod, the shape of which is called an ‘oblate ellipsoid’ travels up and down the slender pole at a rate of 40cm per second, and is designed to offer visitors a 360 degree constantly changing view.

We put the technology to the test and climbed inside one grey October morning, knowing our eyes would never make it across the sea to the Isle of Wight. The mist hampered us from seeing the 26 miles views of the south coast, but we enjoyed looking back inland across the Brighton labyrinth, having a bird’s eye view of the beautifully eerie burnt out pier, and letting our eyes wander across miles and miles of bright blue ocean.