Besides being higher, New Brighton’s tower featured most of Blackpool’s amenities – and more. It may not have contained an aquarium, but it did have an aviary and monkey house. The tower didn’t get off to the luckiest of starts, however. Six construction workers died during the building of it and, soon after it opened, a man committed suicide by jumping off the viewing platform.

Aiming for a degree of refinement, the New Brighton Tower was set in grounds that included an ornamental lake with Venetian gondolas, a Japanese tea room and a garden in the style of the Tuileries in Paris, complete with performing Pierrots. A fairground, theatre, athletics stadium with cycle track and a roller-skating rink suggested there were no limits to the vision. The Wild West show staged during the 1908 season was a hot ticket, even though the cowboys caused havoc with their lassos when out on the town on their evenings off, while hostelries were ordered by the local authority not to sell intoxicating liquor to the American Indians.

The New Brighton Tower was effectively destroyed by the first world war. Closed during the hostilities, it began to deteriorate, and by the time the war was over the owners had decided the restoration costs were too scary to contemplate. Demolition began in 1919. Although the brick base of the tower and the buildings in the grounds remained open for several decades, they eventually began to look seedy and a fire in 1969 destroyed most of what remained. Blackpool’s only serious rival was no more.

See a postcard of the New Brighton Tower here

The tower-building bug

Competitive tower-building around the world really took off in the 1960s. The countries of the former Soviet bloc in eastern Europe joined in with particular gusto. The Ostankino television and radio tower in Moscow, finished in 1967, remains the second tallest tower in the world today, at a dizzying 1,762ft tall. Partially destroyed by fire in 2000, it reopened, fully renovated, in 2004.

A 1,207ft television tower in the former East Berlin opened in 1969, complete with exhibition hall and that old favourite of tall towers – a revolving restaurant.

Not to be outdone, Kiev, in present-day Ukraine, weighed in with its own 1,263ft television tower in 1973. They were all soon dwarfed, however, by the daddy of them all, the Canadian National Tower in Toronto, all 1,815ft of it. This is still the tallest freestanding tower (as distinct from a building with floors) in the world today.

Other towers of note include the Oriental Pearl Tower in Shanghai (1995, 1,535ft); the Milad Tower in Tehran (2005, 1,427ft) and the Menara in Kuala Lumpur (1996, 1,403ft). By contrast, the boldly named Stratosphere Tower in Las Vegas (1996, 1,149 ft) is a relative slouch.

Many towers make a feature of accentuating any vertigo you may feel by encouraging you to walk across a glass floor at the top, as at Blackpool and Toronto, or by ascending in a transparent lift, a speciality of the new Spinnaker Tower in Portsmouth (2005, 558ft) – which also features Walking on Air, the largest glass floor in Europe. At the Macau Tower (2001, 1,109ft), in the former Portuguese enclave of Macau in China, it’s possible to walk around an outside ledge at the top, suspended by a harness hooked up to an overhead rail.

High risk

Incidences of fire in the world’s tall towers remain a potential nightmare. The one that broke out near the top of the Ostankino in Moscow in August 2000 blazed for several days before anybody quite knew what to do about it.

These fears were cleverly played on in one of the most successful of the spate of 1970s disaster movies, The Towering Inferno (1974), set in a fictional 138-storey building in San Francisco. After an extensive bunch of Hollywood stars has been variously frazzled and drenched, Steve McQueen’s embittered fire chief reminds the building’s architect (Paul Newman) that no fire appliance in the city can reach higher than the seventh floor.