A Giant Vegas-Style Sphere in London? Don’t Bet on It.

LONDON – What happens in Vegas, it turns out, really does stay in Vegas.

The American company behind the Sphere, the gargantuan orb that shimmers, twinkles and glows just off the Las Vegas Strip, has formally withdrawn its proposal to build a sister Sphere in London.

Declaring that the plan had become a hostage to political rivalries, Madison Square Garden Entertainment said this week it would take the “groundbreaking technology” to other, more “forward-thinking cities.”

The decision was not a major surprise: Last November, London’s Labour Party mayor, Sadiq Khan, blocked the Sphere, which would have been built on a 4.7-acre site next to the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in Stratford, in East London.

The exterior of the building, wrapped in 54,000 square meters of LED lighting, would have been a glaring source of light pollution for nearby residents, Khan concluded.

But some argued that the rancorous demise of the Sphere attested to the complexities of building large projects in Britain. The Conservative national government, citing budget constraints, recently scaled back a high-speed rail line between London and Manchester that was a cornerstone of its plan to spread economic prosperity to the north.

Planting a Vegas knockoff on the site of a former parking lot next to a commuter train station did not generate the kind of aesthetic debates that have dogged other major projects in London. But it agitated neighbors who did not relish the prospect of opening their curtains to what is, for all intents and purposes, a vast advertising billboard, with enough wattage to outshine the glitter palaces of the Strip.

It is a deflating end to a project that began with considerable fanfare in 2018.

Even Khan initially welcomed the announcement of the Sphere, saying that it would cement London’s reputation as a mecca for live music.

London is no stranger to eye-popping edifices: The London Eye, the giant observation wheel on the south bank of the Thames, and the Millennium Dome, now the O2 Center, opened within weeks of each other at the turn of this century.

“All these large cities have huge, old industrial hinterlands, where it is acceptable to put things that you would never put in your historic city centers,” said Tony Travers, a professor of politics and authority on city planning at the London School of Economics. “Paris is quite capable of building Disneyland.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.