The Sky Walk glass floor
At 100 m you walk on glass with the quayside straight beneath your feet; children love it far more than their parents do.
A hundred metres up, Portsmouth suddenly makes sense: the natural harbour opens beneath you like a living chart, grey Royal Navy warships sit in their basin, and ferries carve across the Solent towards an Isle of Wight that looks close enough to touch. Spinnaker Tower, a 170-metre billowing sail opened in October 2005, is one of the tallest publicly accessible structures in Britain outside London, and its view is neither cityscape nor seascape but both at once. A fast lift reaches the main View Deck (100 m) in well under a minute. This is where the 'Sky Walk' glass floor sits, the one adults edge around while children lie flat on it without a second thought. The second deck, 'The Clouds' (105 m), is the dining level, reserved for afternoon-tea and Sky Bar bookings rather than standard tickets; the 'Sky Garden' at the top (110 m) is open to the weather under a mesh roof, reached by stairs only, and you feel the wind on your face even in July. On a clear day the view runs to roughly 37 km. A standard walk-up ticket is about £19.50 for an adult and £15.50 for a child. Online tickets are markedly cheaper (around £12), but online booking is suspended from 1 October 2026, so it becomes pay-at-the-door only. The tower opens daily from 10:00 (10:30 Monday to Thursday) until 18:00, last entry 17:30. Pushchairs can ride the lift to the main deck, and a full visit takes 45 to 60 minutes. The honest advice: do not go up on a grey or wet day. The view is the only thing on sale, and the 'view guarantee' (a free return visit if cloud hides the three Solent forts) covers advance tickets only, not walk-up ones, and in any case does not give you back a lost afternoon. The tower stands in the Gunwharf Quays outlet complex, a 5-10 minute walk from Portsmouth Harbour station, with the centre's multi-storey car park two or three minutes away. If you are doing the Historic Dockyard and HMS Victory the same day, save the tower for last, when the sun sits low over the island.
At 100 m you walk on glass with the quayside straight beneath your feet; children love it far more than their parents do.
The top deck has only a mesh roof, is reached by stairs, and puts the wind, the sea and the Isle of Wight in front of you with no glass in between.
Royal Navy ships, the Historic Dockyard and the ferries in one sweep that reaches 37 km on a clear day.
Gunwharf Quays, Portsmouth PO1 3TT
If the sky is clear, go up: an hour is enough and the view explains the whole city. On a grey day, put the money into the Historic Dockyard and HMS Victory instead; without a view the tower is just an expensive lift.
Yes for the main View Deck at 100 m, which the lift serves directly and where the glass floor is. The Clouds above it is reserved for dining bookings, and the open-air top is stairs only, so anyone who cannot climb stays on the main deck and misses little.