AN ARTICLE in the Argus (February 2014) stated that the i360 would pose very little financial risk to taxpayers, because the council would borrow the millions of pounds required at one rate and lend it to the developers at a higher rate.

It continued by saying that the net result would be an initial income to the council of more than £1 million a year, once it was up and running.

Well, it now looks as though someone’s crystal ball must have misted over, blurring his view of the future, because things haven’t actually worked out in the way that the person who penned those words envisioned.

And who was this prophet of profits? Why, none another than the Sage of Sussex himself, the paper’s very own Adam Trimingham!

Mind you, he was not alone in perceiving success for the i360 because, just four months later, someone was quoted in The Argus as being of the opinion that it would bring another 750,000 visitors a year to Brighton.

It now looks as though he too was a bit off the mark as he peered into the future of the “eyesore sixty”. Perhaps he

borrowed Adam’s transparent glass ball when the Sage wasn’t looking.

In between these two articles The Argus published a letter from me, on the subject of the i360, which concluded with the words, “A cash cow for Brighton or a costly white elephant for its residents?”

Hopefully the people of Brighton and Hove will get this question answered in the very near future, or else this tower will end up being regarded by our grandchildren as “a building that appears to have no practical purpose, or a purpose which appears less important than its striking and unusual design”, in other words a folly, just like the ones the Victorians used to build; totally useless and often a blot on the landscape.

Eric Waters, Lancing