What is the British version of the Eiffel Tower?
Avery Rath
2025-04-21 07:54:44
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The tower was the brainchild of Sir Edward William Watkin, 1st Baronet, a railway entrepreneur who envisioned creating an attraction to rival that of the Eiffel Tower, but surpassing the latter in size to achieve the title of the world’s tallest building. Watkin approached Gustave Eiffel to design his tower, but the Frenchman declined, so he launched an architectural competition in 1890 that received 68 designs for consideration. The winning entry was submitted by MacLaren, William Dunn and engineer AD Stewart, consisting of an eight-legged 366m tall metal tower – 45.8 metres taller than the Eiffel Tower. The project commissioned a scaled back variation on the design that resembled the Eiffel Tower. The story of Watkin’s Tower was described by the then Poet Laureate, Sir John Betjeman, who said: “Beyond Neasden there was an unimportant hamlet where for years the Metropolitan didn’t stop. Wembley. Slushy fields and grass farms. Then out of the mist arose Sir Edward Watkin’s dream: an Eiffel Tower for London.” The tower was later known as “Watkin’s Folly” and also as the “Great Tower of London”. The tower was constructed at the site of present-day Wembley Stadium in what was the rural Middlesex hamlet called Wembley.
Destini Corwin
2025-04-21 07:54:21
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The Eiffel Tower cast a different kind of spell at the turn of the century. English artist William Morris called the Eiffel Tower “a hellish piece of ugliness,” in the socialist newspaper Commonweal, after seeing its debut at the Paris Exposition of 1889. In an ironic twist, out of all of the copycat designs the Eiffel Tower has inspired through the years, the critical British were the first to replicate the idea immediately after some were done trashing it. A mere six months after the tower’s completion, Sir Edward Watkin, a politician and railway entrepreneur, saw the potential revenue in the Pairs landmark and went about figuring out how London could get its own tower. A design competition pulled in 68 proposals for a British tower, all at least 200 feet taller than the French design. The winning design, called the Wembley Park Tower, was forced to halt construction due to financial reasons. They had completed only 150 feet of the 1,200-foot structure. Though Britain will never have its own Eiffel Tower, there are plenty of sports fans who probably prefer it that way.
Bettye Ankunding
2025-04-21 07:38:15
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The UK almost has its own Eiffel Tower. The Great Tower of London was designed by Edward Watkins, a railway entrepreneur who is known for the expansion of the Metropolitan Railway which is part of the London Underground. This would include the tower designed to be just like the Eiffel Tower. The winner was eventually a slender version of the Eiffel Tower just taller and with eight legs rather than four, and would have restaurants, shops, a 90-room hotel, theatres and dancing rooms and a winter garden. The Great Tower of London would be 1,200ft - taller than the 1,063ft Eiffel Tower, as well as the Shard. Sadly just one part of it was made, due to later problems including subsidence - it was later destroyed. Dubbed the London Stump, it was demolished just a few years later and destroyed by dynamite.
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