Why has London got a cable car and who uses it? Useless for work travel - great for tourism (UK)

They are a familiar sight in the mountains of the French and Swiss Alps, but not in urban terrains - so why does London have a cable car? 15/May/2026 Some call it the Dangleway (although officially it is now called the London Cable Car) on the day it opened in 2012, by a quirk of fate I was the first journalist on it ahead of the then-mayor Boris Johnson. Somehow, I ended up in a car with the then Transport Commissioner Peter Hendy. Back then, the emphasis was on how the , externalcable car could be a viable commuter route for lots of people and handy resilience if the Jubilee line went down. It was also touted as being a regeneration tool for the whole area. But many at Transport for London (TfL) are now pretty open in their belief that it's basically a tourist attraction. Surprisingly - perhaps - the cable car actually makes a tidy little profit. It is also the only place on TfL services where you are permitted to drink alcohol: £32 per person for the champagne experience, if you're interested. 'World's most expensive urban cable car' The idea for a cable car between the Royal Docks and the Greenwich Peninsula surfaced in the 1990s ahead of the opening of the Millennium Dome, but it never happened. It was revived by Johnson to give a bit of pizzazz to the Olympic transport legacy. Even though TfL never said it would be open for the Olympics, it did open prior to the Games to much fanfare on 28 June 2012. There was also criticism that it was a vanity project. Costing about £60m, it was at the time the most expensive urban cable car in the world. During that era, there was quite a lot of money available for new infrastructure - in fact £8m for the cable car came from the European Union as it was designed to help regeneration - so Johnson did not rule out other cable cars for London. #cablecar #londoncablecar #cablecar2026