To celebrate ten years of Spinnaker Tower, we’ve come up with ten fascinating facts you may not have heard before. Discover how many stairs have been climbed in the last decade and just how thick our glass floor sky walk is…
- In the ten years since Spinnaker Tower opened, the internal lift has taken visitors up and down 414,960 times.
- There are 50 show lights on the Spinnaker Tower and 7 aircraft warning lights
- The unique glass floor is made up of 4 panes, each of which measure 2050 x 950mm, giving the floor at total area of 7.79m2. The overall thickness of the glass is 60mm and can hold a total weight of 288 stone. That means 2 black rhinos could cross the glass floor at the same time without it breaking!
- Spinnaker Tower’s legs were built using a ‘slip forming’ method which involves pouring concrete in a continuously moving form. Whilst ‘slip forming’ is not a very unusual method, it is believed that the Spinnaker Tower construction was the first time such a method had been used on hexagonal legs not at right angles to the base – the Tower’s legs are constructed at an angle of approximately 2 degrees, eventually merging at View Deck 1 level
- Originally, there were 3 options for the architecture of the Tower. Put to the public vote among residents of
Portsmouth, 60% voted for the Spinnaker design hence it became the chosen design, reflecting the city’s unique maritime heritage.
- 115 metres up and in high winds, the Tower can flex approximately 150mm.
- Approximately 50,000 glasses of bubbly have been served at Spinnaker Tower during evening events. This is equivalent to 2.5 Olympic-sized swimming pools being filled to the brim with bubbly!
- In the last ten years, we have served approximately 382,720 slices of cake. That’s enough calories to feed a blue whale for 2 whole months!
- There are 560 stairs to the top of Spinnaker Tower. If every visitor in the last ten years had
climbed the stairs rather than taken our speedy lift, 1.68 billion stairs would have been conquered. That’s equivalent to climbing Mount Everest over 30,000 times!!
- 3000 people have abseiled the Spinnaker Tower on public abseiling days since the opportunity first arose in 2011. The distance abseiled is further than the distance between the earth and the International Space Station!