London Eye

1. You can see around 40km from the top – as far as Windsor Castle on a clear day.

London Eye
London Eye



2. The London Eye can carry 800 guests per rotation – equivalent to 11 London red double-decker buses.

3. There are 32 capsules in total, one for each of the London boroughs.  For superstitious reasons they are numbered up to 33, with capsule 13 left out for good luck.

4. Each of the 32 capsules weighs 10 tonnes. To put that figure into perspective, it’s the same weight as 1,052,631 pound coins!

5. Each rotation takes approximately 30 minutes, meaning that a capsule travels at a stately 26cm per second, or 0.9km (0.6 miles) per hour – twice as fast as a tortoise sprinting; this slow rate of rotation allows guests to step on and off without the wheel having to stop.

6. In one year the London Eye will rotate 7668 times, or 2300 miles, as far as from London to Cairo in Egypt, home to other wonders of the world

7. The circumference of the wheel is 424m (1,392ft) – meaning that if it were unravelled, it would be 1.75 times longer than the UK’s tallest building (One Canada Square at Canary Wharf) which is 244m tall!

8. The height of the London Eye is 135m (443ft – equivalent to 64 red telephone boxes piled on top of each other), making it the fifth tallest structure in London after the BT Tower, Tower 42, 30 St Mary Axe (The Gherkin) and One Canada Square in Canary Wharf.

9. Supermodel Kate Moss holds the record for the UK celebrity that’s enjoyed the most rotations, standing at 25, and Hollywood star Jessica Alba holds the record for an overseas celebrity that’s enjoyed the most rotations, standing at 31.

10. With an average of 3.75 million visitors a year, the London Eye receives more visitors annually than ancient wonders of the world like theTaj Mahal (2.4 million per year), Stonehenge (850,000 per year) and even the Great Pyramids of Giza (3 million per year).

By daryl

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