London Eye Raindrops
23 February 2011 · 16:31 · London Eye, South Bank, London
The London Eye makes one full rotation every thirty minutes, which is slow enough that you do not feel the movement and fast enough that the view shifts noticeably if you look away and then back. On a clear day the wheel's designers, David Marks and Julia Barfield, calculated a sightline of 25 miles in all directions — far enough to see Windsor Castle to the west and the beginnings of the North Downs to the south. On a wet February afternoon in 2011, with four young boys in tow and a light shower running down the outside of the glass, the view was rather more intimate than that.
What the grey February afternoon gave instead was the capsule itself: the rain-covered glass turning the cityscape below into something soft and impressionist, the structural frame of the wheel resolving into sharp geometry against a flat grey sky, and the adjacent pod — carrying its own cargo of wet and slightly resigned visitors — sitting in the foreground with an oddly formal presence. The silhouetted figures inside it, the oval form of the capsule, the latticed mounting frame below, and the London roofline dissolving into low cloud behind: the image more or less composed itself.
The London Eye was opened to paying visitors on 9 March 2000, having been formally unveiled by Tony Blair on New Year's Eve 1999, though a capsule clutch problem delayed the public launch by several months. It was conceived by Marks and Barfield as a submission to a 1993 competition run by the Sunday Times and the Architecture Foundation to mark the millennium — one of the few competition entries actually built, and by some distance the most visible. At 135 metres it held the title of the world's tallest observation wheel until 2006. Its 32 sealed, air-conditioned capsules each weigh 10 tonnes and carry up to 25 passengers; the number 32 is not incidental — it corresponds to the 32 London boroughs. Originally intended as a temporary structure with a five-year planning consent, it has now been a permanent fixture of the South Bank for a quarter of a century.
Spread across the lower portion of the frame, below the capsule and its mounting frame, is the spread of south London: the grey roof of Waterloo station visible in the middle distance. Waterloo was opened on 11 July 1848 by the London and South Western Railway, replacing the earlier Nine Elms terminus as a site closer to the West End. It was never intended to be a permanent terminus — the original plan was to continue the line east toward the City — and the station grew through the second half of the nineteenth century in a haphazard, platform-by-platform fashion that became notorious for its complexity. It was completely rebuilt in a "Great Transformation" project completed in 1922, when the current station opened with the Victory Arch over its main entrance — Portland stone and bronze, depicting War and Peace, with Britannia holding the torch of liberty above — as a memorial to the LSWR staff who died in the First World War. It remains Britain's largest station by floor space and, until recently, its busiest by passenger numbers.
Rafferty, Monty, Milo and Gabriel — aged nine, seven, five and three — were far too busy looking at the view and arguing over their snacks to be bothered by the rain.
Canon PowerShot S95 · 6mm (28mm equiv.) · f/4.0 · 1/250s · ISO 80
The S95 was Canon's flagship compact from 2010–12, notable for its f/2.0 wide-end lens, full manual controls, and RAW shooting in a shirt-pocket body — popular with street and travel photographers who wanted capable hardware without the bulk of an interchangeable-lens camera. The 1/250s shutter at ISO 80 in flat February overcast is fast enough to pin each water droplet against the glass with some precision, which is what the image turns on.
