In spring 2000, developer Irvine Sellar met Italian architect Renzo Piano in Berlin to discuss replacing the 1970s Southwark Towers near London Bridge. Piano said he hated conventional skyscrapers, then sketched a tapering spire on the back of a menu, inspired by ship masts and Canaletto’s church spires. English Heritage called it a shard of glass through the heart of historic London, and the developers adopted the insult as the official name. The design used 11,000 angled glass panes meant to reflect the changing sky. When the credit crunch hit in 2007 and costs rose from 350 million to nearly 435 million pounds, Qatari investors stepped in, and today the State of Qatar owns 95 percent.

The 309.6 meter tower was one of the first UK buildings redesigned after the NIST report on the World Trade Center, using post-tensioned concrete and a 400 millimeter sway tolerance. It was also the UK’s first top-down build, digging basements while the core rose. Its 500 ton, 66 meter spire was test assembled on an airfield in North Yorkshire. Inside, offices, restaurants, the Shangri-La hotel, and a public observatory are stacked vertically, but the ten apartments on floors 53 to 65 have never been occupied.

• Children of Men used a CGI Shard in the London skyline before the real building existed
• A fox named Romeo lived near the 72nd floor during construction, eating builders’ scraps
• Oxford researcher Bradley Garrett said over 20 urban explorers reached the top during construction
• In 2013 staff gave six Greenpeace climbers protesting Shell’s Arctic drilling safety advice during their 16 hour ascent
• Free climber George King-Thompson scaled it without ropes in 2019 and received six months’ detention for breaching an injunction