London Eye saved from closure

By David Browne
LONDON (eTurboNews) — The mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, has stepped in to the row that had threatened the city’s star tourist attraction, the London Eye. As reported in eTurboNews last week, the landowners of the site beside the River Thames are demanding a huge rent rise.

The London Eye has proved to be a big draw for tourists since its inception as a landmark to mark the 2000 Millennium, and it is featured on publicity literature for London’s bid to host the 2012 Olympic Games.

London newspaper The Evening Standard launched a campaign to save the London Eye from eviction from its prime site close to the Houses of Parliament and the South Bank arts center. The campaign has been backed by politicians, celebrities and tourism officials.

But when an offer was made by a French company to buy the attraction – the biggest observational wheel in the world – with plans to dismantle it and re-erect it in Paris, the London mayor intervened.

He gave a warning to the landowners, the South Bank Centre, that he would use his legal powers to make a compulsory purchase order on the land if the crisis over rents was not resolved.

Livingstone called for the resignation of the chairman of SBC, businessman Lord Hollick, a close associate of Prime Minister Tony Blair.

“Now with the bid from France to take over the London Eye and park it in the middle of Paris for their Olympic bid, it just shows what a complete prat Lord Hollick has become and how damaging he is to Britain’s interests, and he should go,” said Mayor Livingstone.

SBC has demanded a rise in annual rent from £65,000 to £2.5 million, a sum that the London’s owners, British Airways, say is uneconomic.  Livingstone called it a ridiculous rent demand that had provoked a fiasco.

“The simple reality is that were such a demand to be agreed, it would simply be passed on to tourists,” he said.

A compulsory purchase order would put ownership of the land into the Greater London Authority, and the mayor and the London Assembly would have powers to set the rent.

The London Assembly passed an all-party resolution calling for the rent demand to be withdrawn. Angie Bray, a Conservative member of the London Assembly, told the Evening Standard newspaper that the affair needed swift and firm resolution. “This London Eye row has now gone on for a week. It is damaging our Olympic bid and our tourist industry. We need some decent civic leadership and we need it now.”

A spokesman for the London 2012 Olympic bid committee said “It is interesting that Paris should want to cash in on giving a home to such an iconic London landmark.”

(£1.00=US$1.81)

May 31, 2005   Posted in: England