BRIGHTON, once famous for its West Pier with a grand ballroom at the end (the pier destroyed by fire decades ago), instead welcomes only seagulls and flocks of starlings to what remains of the prestigious promontory. Now, it boasts a 162-metre concrete block of neo-brutalism, aptly named the i360, that was built in 2014 at the former entrance to the pier, when Brighton & Hove Council secured funding from the Government’s Public Loans Fund.
What a contrast in aesthetics! If you haven’t been to Brighton for a while, you won’t have seen this column, built as an observation tower, that broods over the shoreline. It’s difficult to think of a structure more befitting of the label ‘concrete monstrosity’ (although readers may know of competitors).
The owner, with sponsorship from British Airways, opened the tower in 2016. Initially successful, its novelty faded. With mounting debt to the council, the company closed it at the end of last year, blaming lost revenue on the ‘pandemic’. Local people know the real reason: there is a limit to the number of people willing to pay £18.50 just to see the city and its environs from a height.
Brighton, as an attraction for a bird’s eye view, is not quite what you get from the London Eye or Shard, which overlook Buckingham Palace, the River Thames, and Tower Bridge, among a catalogue of iconic places. The ridiculously spelled i360’s all-round view includes 180 degrees of nothing but sea, and underwhelming points of interest such as the Brighton & Hove Albion football stadium, the incinerator at Southwick, and, perhaps, a ferry leaving Newhaven. There really was no need for a rotating viewing platform.
Despite all that, rumours have circulated that the £51million indebted white elephant may get a new lease of life, reportedly rescued by an upmarket ‘trendy’ cocktail bar chain. Will the reopened tower share with the better days of the pier a sense of affluence and exclusivity? Exclusivity, maybe. I shudder at the likely price of drinks atop the concrete pillar.
Dubbed ‘London-by-the-Sea’, the city is heavily populated by the privileged metropolitan class, as well as radical students on a passing stage to jobs in the professional-managerial bureaucracy. Decidedly Woke and Green, unlike the conservative seaside resort of the past (before the Mods and Rockers arrived), the affluent mask and lockdown-compliant culture of Brighton, hostile to dissenters and anyone of traditional or patriotic outlook alike, will no doubt turn a blind eye to the tower’s carbon footprint. So strictly observant of the Covid-19 regime, as I experienced in a pub in 2021, the new investors have to hope that another pandemic won’t strike again, and the worried well of Brighton won’t be donning masks and maintaining social distancing, leaving the cocktail bar to count the cost.
Compared to my first visit to Brighton in 1988, when I came down to watch a hip-hop gig at the Brighton Conference Centre by Public Enemy and Run DMC (the American rappers had performed at Brixton on the previous night, and the white teenagers of Sussex must have seemed rather innocent) nowadays Brighton looks down on its surroundings, believing itself to be cutting edge.
Many of its pubs take card payment only. Ask the barman why cash isn’t accepted, and he’ll look at you as if you’re stupid. Along the squalid streets, inhabited by hundreds of homeless beggars, are overpriced restaurants. Typically, however, the Brighton woke are not too keen on free speech, and any dissent tends to be targeted by zealous Lefties, like a recent event that was stopped by the pub management after threats from Antifa types.
The rise and fall, and possible rise again, of Brighton’s faulty tower symbolises all that’s now wrong with the former seaside gem. Whether in use or not, it’s an unholy eyesore, and I choose those words carefully. The i360 is Brighton’s folly, a Tower of Babel reaching in futility to claim heaven for Sodom and Gomorrah, Mammon and stupidity.
