Do we really need the Big Wheel?

I’M afraid I don’t read The Chronicle very regularly, so don’t know how much coverage you’ve already given to the projected Newcastle Big Wheel.

But I was down by the the Ouseburn sluicegate for a walk last Sunday and spotted the planning notices. I also learnt that it’s now too late to lodge objections. But surely it’s not too late to stop this nonsense?

Londoners, after all, stopped the silly garden bridge quite late in the day.

Who decided that Tyneside needed a big wheel? The same people who decided Newcastle didn’t need a concert hall - so allowing it to be built in an exposed and inaccessible site in Gateshead?

Or who advertised Newcastle throughout Europe as a great place to come and get drunk?

What will you be able to see from the top of a wheel that you can’t already see from the top

of the castle, or Grey’s Monument? Or, if you can’t climb stairs, from the Baltic?

What’s more, this thing will ruin one of the best existing views of Newcastle, from the Free Trade Inn.

When I was on my walk I also discovered the newly-built Maling Terrace. Wasn’t Maling’s once the biggest ceramics factory in the world?

Nearby is a plaque commemorating a two hundred-year-old bottle factory. Once we made useful things on Tyneside - not just guns.

Two years ago I bought a new bathroom suite and was horrified to see, when it arrived, that it had been made in the United Arab Emirates: Adamsez used to make this stuff in the Scotswood Road.

Tyneside needs an “eye” like it needs a poke in the eye, of which its had too many already.

Why not build the world’s largest urinal instead, in commemoration of our industrial heritage?

People who come to Newcastle to get drunk, and disgruntled locals, can all go and vomit in it.

ANDREW POTTS, Wallsend