Brighton’s newest attraction opened in 2016, at the point the now defunct West Pier used to make landfall. The world’s most slender tower is a brutal, 162m-tall column of reinforced steel and concrete rising like a space-age phallus (this is Brighton after all) from the seafront, with a huge, impaled, glass doughnut taking ‘passengers’ 138m above the city for some gob-smacking vistas of the Sussex coast.
The i360 is the world’s tallest moving observation tower and the vistas from it are truly spectacular – certainly much better than the views of it, especially as it rises incongruously near the architectural purity that is Regency Sq. A fancy restaurant and bars huddle at the base. The idea is that profits from the i360, a 21st-century ‘vertical pier’, will one day be used to rebuild the horizontal West Pier.