The Sky Tower

The Sky Tower is Rhyl's most distinctive landmark — a slender steel observation tower standing 65 metres above the West Parade, visible from miles along the North Wales coast. Its history is unlikely, its current purpose modest, and its presence on the Rhyl skyline oddly moving.

From Glasgow to Rhyl

The Sky Tower was not built for Rhyl. It was constructed for the 1988 Glasgow Garden Festival, one of the series of regeneration-driven festivals that briefly brought life to post-industrial sites across Britain in the 1980s. At Glasgow it served as an observation attraction, carrying visitors to its viewing platform high above the festival grounds. When the festival ended, Rhyl was one of the few places prepared to take it on — it arrived on the West Parade in 1989 and for the next two decades served as one of the resort's headline attractions.

The tower was manufactured by Intamin of Switzerland — the same company behind numerous theme park rides worldwide. The design is a gyro tower: a gondola rises up a central column while rotating, giving passengers a slowly revolving panoramic ascent. Intamin produced several of these in the late 1980s and they appeared at various European and American locations; the concept is similar to the Astrotower that stood at Astroland in Coney Island, Brooklyn, though that was a different manufacturer (Von Roll, 1964) and predated the Rhyl tower by 25 years. The gyro tower format is immediately recognisable to anyone who rode a comparable machine elsewhere.

At its peak the Sky Tower was genuinely impressive: visitors were carried up in a gondola to a rotating viewing platform from which, on a clear day, you could see the Snowdonian peaks to the south-west, the Great Orme to the west, and across the Irish Sea to the mountains of the Isle of Man and the Irish coast. It was one of those experiences — briefly vertiginous, suddenly panoramic — that lodges in childhood memories.

Closure and Rebirth as a Beacon

The Sky Tower closed to the public in 2010 as maintenance costs rose and visitor numbers declined. It stood dark for several years — another symbol of the resort's contraction that was hard to ignore. In 2017 it was repurposed rather than demolished: converted into an illuminated landmark, the tower now cycles through colour sequences after dark, visible across the bay and along the promenade. The light display is particularly striking in winter when the sky turns early and the promenade is quiet — a beacon marking the town's presence rather than an operational attraction.

The conversion required significant structural work and engineering, which the local authority supported. It was the right decision: a landmark is more useful than an empty tower, and the Sky Tower's silhouette remains integral to Rhyl's skyline identity.

Viewing the Tower

The Sky Tower cannot currently be climbed — it is a visual landmark, not an accessible attraction. The best views of the tower itself are from the beach at low tide, from the promenade looking west, and from across the Marine Lake. After dark, particularly in autumn and winter, the light display is worth watching from the seafront. The sequence changes periodically.