When the London Eye was built, it was to become the fourth highest structure in London behind 1 Canada Square (more commonly known as Canary Wharf), Tower 42 (the one-time Nat West Tower) and the Post Office Tower.
The construction method employed was to assemble pre-fabricated components on pontoons on the River Thames. Once the complete structure of the wheel had been put together horizontally, it then had to be raised through ninety degrees to its operating position.
The first two pictures show the structure while it was still flat.
The next two pictures show the barge crane used to do much of the heavy lifting during the early stages of construction. The building behind the crane is the Shell building, while the building behind the horizontal London Eye structure is the old County Hall building (home of the now defunct Greater London Council).
Once the wheel had been assembled in a horizontal position, the next step was to raise it until it was vertical.
The first attempt to do so resulted in failure - fortunately before the structure had been raised off the pontoons, or the newspaper headline the next day might have been Splash!
After a couple of weeks in which the engineers did some redesign on the cables used during the raising process, a second and successful attempt was made to raise the wheel to its vertical operating position. This was a two stage process, with the wheel being raised into the position shown in the rest of the pictures, where it remained for a couple of weeks, before being raised the rest of the way to vertical.
I never took any pictures during the construction of the structure once it was vertical, and I've been hanging onto the pictures above for the day when I'd be able to complete the story.
Now, in 2003, more than three years after completion of the London Eye, I have finally taken some pictures of the finished structure, which is no longer the fourth highest structure in London, as it has been overtaken by several buildings in the Canary Wharf development and also by the new Swiss Re building in The City.
I was going to save them for another page, but I've decided to put them up here instead. They were taken with a Pentax MZ-M.
You'll have to forgive the lens flare on this shot. I lined up the top of the Royal Festival Hall so that it showed through the bottom of the wheel, and in the process I got too close to a street light on Westminster Bridge, and I didn't shade my lens properly from this unwanted light.
I did make an attempt to avoid the light pollution affecting the last shot when I took this close-up shot of some of the pods, but the built-in lens hood on my Tamron 85-210 lens wasn't sufficient to keep all of the unwanted light out, so I was using my hand, which must have shaken during the course of this 30 second exposure, as there's a little bit of red right as the top of the picture which I hadn't intended to have there.
