Olympic Tower Scuppers Skylon’s Return

Among the many reasons one may have to dislike Boris Johnson’s Olympic vanity project is the fact that it has destroyed any chance of Skylon being rebuilt in the Stratford park, report Private Eye and the Architect’s Journal (subscription). A campaign to resurrect Skylon, the humble cigar-shaped monument built for the 1951 Festival of Britain, and place it on the Olympic site, was launched last year, yet Kapoor’s recondite non-rollercoaster has ended the slim hope that it would return. Londoners will have the opportunity to ask themselves which was preferable: a simple, elegant, unselfish structure, that delighted for a while, didn’t outstay its welcome and cost half a mil by today’s standards, or a showy, £20m turdilith of bent steel that’ll offer a nice example for future historians of early 21st-century British folly.

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