The Shard – St Thomas Street, SE1
‘Is it safe?’
Just as it dominates London’s skyline, the Shard diminishes its neighbourhood.
Having started to blossom in the last 15 years or so, not least because of the influx of urban foodies flocking to the evermore chi-chi Borough Market, the Southwark surrounding the Shard is now shown up to be a scruffy, down-at-heel loser. Streets that until a year or so ago could have been considered charmingly quirky are suddenly seen in a different light: potholed, rubbish strewn and depressing. The once grand Georgian outposts of Guy’s Hospital are like potless toffs – forever harking back to a glorious past because they’re not coping too well with today.
View Towards Canary Wharf – The Shard, 69th Floor
London is a curmudgeonly old git. Any change is begrudged and grumbled over, the tut-tutting never louder than when a skyscraper goes up. St Paul’s is the tower against which all the others are compared, not because of its height – a mere 365 feet – but to assess whether the latest lofty Johnny-come-Lately blocks a view of it. As the tallest building in Europe, the Shard at 1016 ft easily outstrips not just Wren’s landmark, but the Post Office Tower (581ft), the Gherkin (590 ft) and Canary Wharf (771ft). We know this because, just as the Shard, with its tip often in the clouds, is more-or-less inescapable in large parts of the capital, as if it’s giving its detractors an elegant finger, inside the building there are reminders of just how far it surges above the competition – for those who don’t want to see for themselves out of the floor-to-ceiling windows up on the 69th floor.
‘Is it safe?’ Getting to the viewing platforms is a two stage process; the lift to the lift. It doesn’t feel safe when you’re on floor 30-something, waiting to be taken to up to the sky. A nails-down-a-blackboard, can’t-hear-yourself-think, screaming fills the hall, caused by air in the lift shaft and the cars plunge downwards. As yet, the Shard isn’t finished; apparently there are gaps somewhere in the shaft’s 70-something storey length. Or something. Who cares how and why the air screams? It’s a horrible, horrible noise. People waiting cover their ears.
Out of the lift and up some stairs and you’re there. Almost at the top of the tallest building this side of the Atlantic. For anyone who gets vertigo, it’s torture. Szell drilling through Babe Levy’s teeth in Marathon Man.‘Is it safe?’ It doesn’t feel it. The Gherkin, Canary Wharf, Hyde Park, Tower Bridge, Battersea Power Station are all tip-tilting – magnets pulling you down towards them. It’s even worse three floors up, which is partly open to the sky and the wind. Whether the gift shop fits in with Renzo Piano’s vision is doubtful. However, once safely down, ‘1,001 Buildings You Must See Before You Die’ is probably a more appropriate buy than Shard fridge magnets, Shard tees or the weirdly uncute soft toy version of Romeo, the fox who roamed the building for a fortnight, living off builders’ food and saving himself the 25 quid entrance fee.
Open to the elements – Shard 72nd Floor
The Shard is beautiful. It is a monument to today, right now. But if architecture is frozen music, the Shard sounds a discordant note in SE1, a neighbourhood that is still trying to holler out the stuff of Victorian music halls – ‘Roll out the Barrel’; ‘My Old Man’. Who else could better give the area its new soundtrack than Philip Glass?
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