The desire for shape-making continues in the visitor centre adjoining the lower canal basin. This is not perfect, but it is reasonably good, even though it does not now sit in the water as originally planned. It is one of those upturned-boat-hull buildings, very like the much larger Glasgow Science Centre by architects BDP, and perhaps also influenced by the early Miralles designs for the Parliament building. Clad satisfyingly in cedar planks on the rear, and lined with birch plywood panels inside, the big move of this building is its sloping glass façade, which gives an excellent sideways-one view of the Wheel. This will be a tremendous place to sit and sip a coffee while the boats ascend and descend before your very eyes. There is a small exhibition about the canals and how the lift works, but this is really a backdrop rather than an immersive experience. With that giant piece of engineering right in front of you, who needs display panels?

Thus newly restored and linked, the Forth and Clyde and Union canals now have a problem that is not faced by their English and Welsh equivalents. Being isolated from the rest of the British canal network, and having been out of use for so long, there are not yet many boats to use them. Stirling anticipates it will take five years for a reasonable number of leisure craft to build up, and even then this will be a peaceful waterway by English standards. As he points out, the 5.5million towpath walkers and cyclists are really the important customers.

So the Wheel is, in cold terms, unnecessary. A conventional new flight of locks would have done just as well instead, given the light traffic expected on these waterways. But this is to miss the point that the Wheel is an attraction in its own right. You will go there to buy a ticket and ride the Wheel in a British Waterways boat - and by the summer, specially-built high-tech amphibious buses as well. There will be corporate entertainment, concerts on a floating platform in the lower basin with its landscaped amphitheatre. No doubt it will become a set for film and video and fashion shoots. It has regenerated a toxic post-industrial wasteland, will be good for the economy of Falkirk and the Lowland corridor, and it will help to finance the running costs of the canals.

All of this is to be applauded. So why don’t I like it more? It is not just its misbegotten look and its startling vulnerability to vandalism. It is the fact that the appeal of British canals was always to do with rediscovering the evocative structures of a real industrial past. In contrast, this feels more like the ultimate garden water feature. It is just a bit too clever, and ever so slightly pointless.