The 7.19m (23ft) tower had been disqualified on Wednesday for being made out of the wrong type of matches.

GWR said on Thursday it was too harsh at first and congratulated model enthusiast Richard Plaud on his record.

The 47-year-old from France said he had been on an “emotional rollercoaster” after spending 4,200 hours building his model from more than 706,000 matches and 23kg of glue.

“For eight years, I’ve always thought that I was building the tallest matchstick structure,” he said.

However, Guinness World Records initially told him the structure did not qualify because he had not used matches that were commercially available.

Plaud started off by using commercial matches, cutting the head off each. Tired of this tedious process, he asked the manufacturer if he could buy just the wooden sticks without the head, prompting Guinness to refuse his record.

Mark Mckinley, a director at Guinness World Records, said: “We’re really excited to be able to approve it… We’re happy to be able to admit that we were a little bit too harsh on the type of matches needed in this attempt, and Richard’s attempt truly is officially amazing.”

Mr Plaud hopes to put his tower on display in Paris for the Olympics in July.

The previous world record was held by Toufic Daher from Lebanon, who built a 6.53m (21ft) Eiffel Tower in 2009.