As Europe's largest Ferris wheel is set to be built in Newcastle, Owen Hatherley questions why the giant wheels are still being built in cities across the world.

Another Ferris wheel has just won planning permission, this time for a site on the Newcastle quayside. It provides an occasion to think about why there has been this unending proliferation of giant wheels since the Millennium, escaping from fairgrounds and occupying inner cities.
One way of guessing what has provoked it comes from the most famous scene in a film ever to take place on a Ferris wheel ? in Carol Reed's 1949 spy film The Third Man. Harry Lime, played by Orson Welles, a charismatic and chirpy American who has faked his own death and become a racketeer dealing in diluted penicillin, smirkingly confronts an old friend who has realised what he's up to. At the top of the Prater Ferris wheel in Vienna, he looks faintly queasy. Graham Greene's script runs: "you know, I never feel comfortable on these sort of things. Victims" Don't be melodramatic. Tell me. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever" If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare" Free of income tax, old man."
A cynical person might wonder whether this notion of human beings as mere ants when looked at from the top might chime with certain aspects...