St Johns Beacon: From Chimney to Radio Tower

You see it from the motorway. That weird cylindrical tower on top of a rectangular block - part spaceship, part 1960s corporate brutalism, part what were they thinking?

The St Johns Beacon has been part of Liverpool’s skyline for over 50 years. But its backstory is weirder than the building itself.

It Started as an Incinerator Chimney

The tower wasn’t designed to be iconic. It was functional plumbing.

In the 1960s, architects John Robert Horne and David Wythe were building the St Johns Precinct shopping centre. Underneath, they needed to install a waste incinerator. Most cities hide this machinery. Liverpool decided to make it architectural.

The tower became a 137-metre concrete chimney with a dramatic pod on top. Someone realized: we’re building this anyway. Why not make it interesting?

The 999 Problem

When the incinerator first fired up, smoke poured from the top of the tower. Every single time.

Merseyside Police received dozens of calls. The public was convinced the city centre was on fire. Crews arrived expecting a blaze. They found a building doing exactly what it was designed to do.

The fire department eventually put up signs. By then, the myth was already forming: Liverpool has a smoking tower on a stick.

Queen Elizabeth Ate Dinner Up There

By 1971, someone had a better idea than waste incineration. Convert the top into a restaurant.

A luxury, revolving restaurant. With prawn cocktails and views across the Mersey. On 24th June 1971, Queen Elizabeth II visited.

Every customer who finished their meal got a Certificate of Orbit - a printed certificate proving they’d slowly rotated 137 metres above Liverpool while eating dinner. This is, genuinely, one of the best ideas anyone has ever had.

The restaurant closed in 1979. Officially: lack of proper fire escape. Unofficially: Liverpool in the late 70s wasn’t ready for spinning dining experiences.

Buck Rogers Nearly Saved It

In 1983, someone tried again. This time with a space-age theme.

The restaurant reopened as a Buck Rogers-themed space restaurant. The building was blue-lit and styled as a spacecraft. Liverpool wasn’t ready. It closed almost immediately due to, as the records bluntly state, lack of customer interest.

The tower sat abandoned for the next decade. Increasingly unloved. Increasingly seen as an eyesore.

The UFO Phase (It Didn’t Work)

By the 1990s, the council faced a choice: demolish it or save it.

Someone’s solution? Wrap it in neon blue UFO lights.

This genuinely happened. The tower was covered in strip lighting designed to make it look like a spacecraft. The theory was: if people think it’s a UFO, they’ll like it more.

People did not like it. The lights were removed during the next refurbishment. The tower stayed standing, but the dream was dead.

Radio City Froze the Past

In 1999, the tower got a proper overhaul. Cost: 5 million pounds. Purpose: make it the home of Radio City.

Engineers discovered something interesting inside: the revolving mechanism still worked. They could have used it. But the broadcasting equipment weighed too much. They bolted the floor in place with steel brackets.

The mechanism is still there. It will never spin again. The ghost of the world’s most niche restaurant lives on, frozen forever in position.

558 stairs lead to the top. Most of them no longer go anywhere that matters.

Listed As Heritage (2020)

In November 2020, Historic England officially granted St Johns Beacon Grade II listed status.

The official description calls it a masterpiece of technological bravura and the spirit of the space age. The same tower people wanted demolished 30 years earlier became protected national heritage.

Today, it houses broadcast studios, office space, and a viewing area. The rotating restaurant is gone. The UFO lights are gone. The incinerator is gone.

What remains is the structure itself - a reminder that Liverpool took something functional and made it look like nothing else on earth.

That’s very Liverpool.