Brighton Wheel: the plan to bring it back

If you have been waiting for the Brighton Wheel to come back to the seafront, the latest word is promising but comes with a fair bit of fine print. On 18 August, Brighton & Hove City Council announced that the wheel could return, and the decision on whether it actually does was set for a Cabinet meeting on 17 September. At stake is a 25-year lease for the family business behind the Brighton Zip and Daltons Venue to run the wheel at its old spot on Madeira Drive. If that goes through, the operator still needs to get planning permission, with the aim of having the wheel turning again by next summer, in 2027.

For anyone who never rode it, the original Brighton Wheel sat on the eastern seafront under the East Cliff, near Brighton Pier, from October 2011 to May 2016. It was a transportable Ferris wheel 45 metres in diameter, reaching 50 metres above sea level at its highest point. There were 35 standard gondolas, each holding up to six adults and two children, plus one VIP gondola for up to four people, with a total capacity of 284 passengers. A full rotation took 12 minutes, and the whole structure could be dismantled and cleared away in two weeks.

The history of how it got there is a bit of a saga. Paramount Attractions first proposed a 60-metre wheel with 32 gondolas in 2009, but that application was withdrawn in January 2010. In March 2011, a new application came in for a wheel of similar size but a different design, at a site on Madeira Drive about 360 feet east of Brighton Pier. The estimated cost was £6 million, with funding secured. Council gave it temporary planning permission until May 2016 at a meeting on 27 April 2011, and it opened to the public on 24 October 2011, the first day of the half-term school holiday. It ran from 10am to midnight most days, though Paramount later pulled the closing time back to 11pm.

It closed on 8 May 2016, and the wheel and its support structure were taken down that same month. The council had announced back in June 2015 that the five-year contract would not be renewed, because of an agreement with the operators of the Brighton i360, which was opening that year, that there would not be two similar tourist attractions so close to each other. That is why it has been gone for a decade.

The bid to bring it back comes from the same hands already working the seafront. The lease would go to a new company being set up by the existing tenant of the Daltons Bastion site, linked to the Brighton Zip and Daltons Bastion operator Madeira Leisure Limited, owned by Jayne and Jeffrey Sanders. Jeffrey Sanders and general manager Delso Da Silva have both backed the proposal. The operators have more than 15 years of experience running seafront attractions and have put more than £1.3 million into the site, including the zip wire and a reinforced base where the old wheel building once stood. Under the new lease, the operator would cover all the costs — staffing, maintenance, business performance and daily running — while the council would get a guaranteed commercial rent over the life of the lease. So for now, the plan is still at the council table, with the hope of a return in 2027.