Grand designs for cities' defining landmarks

12:00pm Sunday 7th October 2007

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By Peter Law »

FROM flying red men to a ghostly church to a vertical theme park in Birmingham - cities up and down the country know how important it is to have a defining landmark.

Ever since Tyneside's Angel of the North captured the public's imagination almost ten years ago, councils, developers and artists have collaborated to create bigger and bolder designs.

Portsmouth's Spinnaker Tower has welcomed more than one million visitors, while the London Eye has already become one of the capital's most popular attractions.

The Daily Echo this week added its voice to a campaign calling for Southampton to have its own defining icon in the form of a grand Spitfire memorial.

Southampton City Council has already pledged £72,000 to the project and vowed to set up a fighting fund to get the sculpture off the ground.

The move came after the Southampton Partnership board decided to spend £120,000 of taxpayers' money on a scale model of the city and £25,000 on new welcome signs in a bid to give the city the wow factor.

Elsewhere in Britain, cities and towns with even smaller profiles than Southampton have already taken steps to create their own landmarks.

One of the most ambitious is a 200 metre vertical theme park planned for Birmingham. The VTP200 would be the tallest tower in the country and feature fun rides - such as the 95 metre Giant Drop - as well as an array of extreme sports activities.

Visitors will be able to walk around the outside of the building at 115 metres, climb to the top, have their photograph taken and even take the plunge on Britain's highest controlled bungee jump.

In Wales, renewed public pride inspired a competition to create three iconic cultural and artistic landmarks to mark major entry points to the country.

The competition received 106 responses and after public consultation a shortlist of three was drawn up.

One of the most striking proposals is to have 300 larger-than-life red men seemingly flying through the sky at the site of the Second Severn crossing.

The £18m scheme has proved hugely popular and has now been shortlisted for funding from the Big Lottery Fund Living Landmarks programme.

Two other ambitious projects - Lost Town, in Essex, and Reeds Bridge, in Cambridge - were the result of a competition to boost the image of East England which attracted more than 230 entries in 2004.

Three years on and both projects have passed feasibility studies, but are still waiting to secure private and public funding.