By Sara Bright
There was a time, not so very long ago, when we built monuments to represent our highest aspirations. We raised cathedrals to God, palaces to power, and bridges to the new possibilities of engineering. At the turn of the millennium, in a fit of slightly anxious optimism, Britain built the London Eye: a vast, elegant wheel designed to lift us up and offer a new perspective on our own history. It was a symbol of a forward-looking, coolly confident nation. And now, we are told, it is to be transformed into the world’s largest candy store.
Let that sentence sink in. The most potent symbol of modern London, a marvel of design and engineering, is to become a temporary sweet shop. The thesis is not merely that this is a vulgar and silly idea, which it is. It is that this proposal represents the logical, terminal stage of a cultural disease that has been rotting the British soul for two decades: the relentless, insatiable, and deeply infantilising logic of the ‘experience economy’. We no longer ask our landmarks to inspire us, to challenge us, or even to represent us. We ask only that they provide a novel backdrop for a selfie and a fleeting, sugar-high distraction from the business of real life.
This is not progress; it is a profound and pathetic surrender.
A Lollipop on the Skyline
The proposal itself is a masterpiece of a certain kind of late-capitalist absurdity. For one month, a soaring wheel of steel and glass will become a dispensary for chocolates, marmalades, and other assorted confectionery. It is an idea that could only have been conceived in a brainstorming session where the sole metric for success was its potential to ‘go viral’. It is an idea designed not for citizens, but for influencers.
The very choice of a candy store is a confession. It is an open admission that the target audience is no longer a discerning public, but a regressive, infantilised consumer for whom ‘fun’ has been reduced to the most primary of sensory inputs. The modern experience economy, which has already given the adults of London ball-pit bars, adult-sized soft play, and ‘immersive’ screenings of films they have seen a hundred times, now offers its crowning achievement: a giant lollipop on the skyline. We have systematically dismantled the barriers between childhood and adulthood, not to foster a sense of mature, playful wonder, but to create a new, highly profitable market of grown-ups who crave the low-stakes consolations of the nursery.
I confess, I find myself missing the quiet, unadorned dignity of the Millennium Dome before it became a shopping centre with a tent on top. Perhaps that makes me a relic. But it seems to me that a culture reveals itself in what it chooses to celebrate. A nation that turns its most prominent modern monument into a sweet shop is a nation that has run out of serious ideas about itself.
The counter-argument, of course, is that this is all just a bit of harmless fun. It is temporary. It is for children. It will bring visitors to the city and give people a unique experience they will never forget. This is the seductive and lazy defence of all such cultural vandalism. It treats each individual act of commercialisation as if it exists in a vacuum, with no cumulative effect. But culture is not a series of disconnected events; it is a narrative. And the narrative we are currently writing is one of slow, steady erasure. Each time we allow a civic space to be repurposed for a vacuous commercial stunt, we lower the bar. We normalise the idea that our public realm is not a shared inheritance to be protected, but a portfolio of assets to be sweated.
The fun is a Trojan horse. Inside it is a grim message: nothing is sacred, everything is for sale, and the highest purpose of a shared symbol is to be a platform for a private brand.
Our Empty Calories Culture
Perhaps I’m mistaken, but the timing of this proposal, emerging from the cultural fog of the early 2020s, feels significant. It speaks of a nation desperate for simple, uncomplicated pleasures, a nation suffering from a kind of post-traumatic stress that leaves it craving empty calories. The candy store in the sky is the perfect metaphor for our political and cultural moment: a spectacular, sugary distraction from the complex, intractable problems on the ground. It is all rush and no sustenance.
This hollowing out of meaning is not unique to the London Eye. It is a business model. Think of the way our great museums, facing relentless funding cuts, are forced to programme blockbuster exhibitions that function more like theme-park rides than scholarly inquiries. Think of our city centres, where distinctive, independent shops are replaced by the same interchangeable global brands, turning our streets into soulless corridors of consumption. This is the same logic at work, just at a spectacular scale. It is the logic that sees a 135-metre-tall wheel not as a piece of civic architecture, but as 32 rentable glass pods of potential advertising space.
The process is analogous to the way a parasitic vine grows over a magnificent old tree. The original structure is still there, but it becomes slowly obscured, its original form and purpose forgotten, until it is nothing more than a support for the new, more vigorous growth. We are allowing our cultural landmarks to become mere scaffolding for fleeting commercial whims.
What is lost is not just a view, but a sense of ourselves. When we look at the great monuments of the past – St Paul’s Cathedral, the Tower of London, the Houses of Parliament – we see a story of power, faith, conflict, and endurance. They tell us something, however complex or contested, about who we were and therefore who we are. What story will a giant, temporary candy store tell future generations about us? It will tell them we were a culture that, at a moment of profound uncertainty, decided the most fitting expression of our national character was a bag of sweets. It is a legacy of profound unseriousness. And that is a very bitter pill to swallow.
