Reflections: The Shard Decade
On 5 July 2022, UCL Urban Lab hosted an event marking ten years to the day since The Shard was formally inaugurated. The event was held at the top of One Canada Square, UCL School of Management with a view of the London skyline. The evening comprised of presentations of recent academic research and an industry panel discussion.
The Shard Decade was co-organised by Urban Lab Co-Director Dr Andrew Harris (UCL Geography) and Urban Lab-affiliated PhD Student Sidra Ahmed (UCL Geography). This piece written by Sidra Ahmed, who is researching contemporary London skyscrapers, documents the evening and reflections made on The Shard.
The Shard has become a familiar London landmark and a common establishing icon for the city. And it has received growing attention in urban studies research in relation to discourses around iconic architecture, urban verticality, skyscraper geography, plutocratic London, and London’s urban planning framework. The summer of 2022 marked ten years since The Shard’s inauguration when it was officially opened to London with a ribbon cutting, laser light show, and crowds that blocked up both London Bridge and Tower Bridge.
The Shard Decade reflected on The Shard’s function, position, branding and symbolism through three moments. Dr Andrew Harris opened the evening by reflecting on The Shard’s relationship with London over the last decade through his urban encounters both as an academic and Londoner. Then, I (Sidra) presented moments from my PhD research on the branding and lived experience of contemporary London skyscrapers, zoning in on my research on The Shard. The moments that actually made The Shard were reflected on with our panel which comprised of individuals all involved in The Shard’s branding, construction and leasing. William Murray (MurrayTwohig), April Taylor (Brand and Marketing Consultant), David Healy (WSP) and James Goldsmith (AXA IM) shared their stories and memories of working on The Shard. Our venue for the evening afforded us a view of the London skyline from One Canada Square — the building that pre-Shard was London’s tallest building — and was kindly hosted at UCL School of Management’s campus.
A moment of ‘I was there’
The first presentation began with a moment of “I was there” with Dr Andrew Harris who attended the lightshow inauguration on London Bridge in 2012. From its inception to present day, The Shard has always incited a love-hate relationship. A point Andrew emphasised to draw on ‘why actually so many people, an estimated 300,000, turned out to see that inauguration show ten years ago’. And it has since ‘very much become an element of London life’.
The Shard has been co-opted and domesticated in careful promotional and branding strategies as well as in our vernacular over the last ten years. From national banking to fashion advertising, The Shard has become a component in advertorial urban scenes where brands position The Shard as part of their messaging for power and imagination. It is a ‘handy yardstick for horizontal buildings and spaces in London to say how long they are with The Shard as a reference point’ referring to Google’s King’s Cross headquarters which has been likened to a ‘landscraper … as long as The Shard is tall’. Another example is Circus West Village encircling Battersea Power Station too which at 327m on its side is longer than The Shard. New projects with The Shard’s same architectural language and Sellar-Piano partnership have also been developed such as the News Building and Shard Place in Shard Quarter, and the Paddington ‘Cube’.
Moments from researching The Shard
The next presentation comprised of moments from life in The Shard and reflections on The Shard’s branding, which I shared as part of my current research on the branding and everyday life of commercial London skyscrapers. Since the early 2000s, London’s skyline has seen a dramatic boom in tall building construction so much so that ‘the visual transformation that central London currently undergoes parallels to that of New York City more than one hundred years ago, when office towers started to replace churches and governmental buildings as the tallest buildings in the city’ (Gunter Gassner, 2017). My research is responding to this changing face of London from an experiential perspective.
I shared vignettes from my research connecting my framework of the lived skyscraper to The (lived) Shard. What makes a skyscraper like The Shard a living space beyond its bricks and mortar (or glass, concrete and steel) is its meaning-making. And one of the themes I shared from my framework that mediates this meaning-making is skyscraper branding. The Shard has often been likened to a compass in the city and described as ‘a new contour to London’s skyline, a new mental geography’ (Irvine Sellar at The Shard’s inauguration, 2012). And The Shard’s capture of the cityscape is further proliferated by its branding positioning The Shard as an anthropomorphic achievement, aspirational and ‘a beacon for Modern London’ earlier in its decade.
Another aspect of The ‘lived’ Shard I reflected on was the last two years of ‘The Shard Decade’ which were lived through a pandemic. This project has also looked at the impact of the pandemic on urban life through the lens of life in the London skyscraper. London was hauntingly quiet in 2020. The Shard was in limited operation. Footfall that was in the thousands on a daily basis had reduced down to a mere pitter patter of essential staff members such as security, estate management and maintenance. This was an important point to remember given the media’s portrayal of the skyscraper during 2020 as redundant and ‘dead’.
Geographer Donald McNeill has described how skyscrapers can be perceived and perform as narrative markers of the story of the city. One way the time of the pandemic was marked in London was with the Light It Blue movement. Like a totem warding off an urban crisis or a ‘beacon’ in another way, The Shard along with other London landmarks lit its spire blue in honour of frontline workers. Among those viewing The Shard’s blue spire at home were its occupiers working remotely and constructing a remote sense of place. ‘It still carries weight’ remarked one of my interviewees, who worked in The Shard, to say ‘I work from home right now, yet still I tell people I’m based in The Shard because of the power that comes from saying that sentence.’
I ended with an array of occupier contemplations on the future of the office during this snapshot in time; from the idea that The Shard would no longer be the same, the rise of hybrid-working, to the point that a skyscraper like The Shard is far from defeated by the pandemic.
Moments that made The Shard: The Panel
The moments that made The Shard with our panel: William Murray (MurrayTwoHig) who, as a director of communications firm Wordsearch, was part of the team responsible for The Shard’s pre-completion branding and communication, including naming. April Taylor is a Brand, Marketing and Product Development Director and was appointed to manage the opening of The Shard and London Bridge Quarter. April has played an instrumental role in the building’s branding and identity. David Healy (WSP) was previously Associate Director at Arup. Arup was responsible for responding to the technical challenges of constructing The Shard’s tapering form and David led The Shard’s building services engineering team. James Goldsmith (AXA IM) was previously Head of Leasing at The Shard with REM and was part of the building’s first leasing team.
The panel shared a constellation of stories and memories of working on The Shard; some of which are shared here. One of the main reflections during the evening was about how The Shard was an outcome of so many firsts in relation to its design, planning and engineering. Neither Irvine Sellar nor Renzo Piano had created a building like The Shard before. It was this partnership, vision and specific set of circumstances that was described by the panel as pivotal to the success of an incredibly complex project.
The character and sheer mindedness of the late developer Irvine Sellar was very much folded into the panel’s memories. Irvine Sellar was remembered as living by George Bernard Shaw’s words as ‘the unreasonable man’ who stuck to his vision for the building despite scepticism from the real estate industry about The Shard ever coming to fruition. April Taylor added that The Shard’s location of London Bridge is part of its success. The Shard stands alone across from the City, is located in the oldest part of London where there is this beautiful juxtaposition of old and new, and fits in to an area that has always been at the heart of innovation.
The specificity of the site is also why The Shard could not have been built elsewhere. A 1999 government White Paper encouraging the development of tall buildings over transport hubs prompted Irvine Sellar to consider redeveloping the 1970s office block, Southwark Towers, that stood on the site. ‘It feels so well connected to the station. It’s a seamless connection and you kind of have the visual motif of the tracks when you’re in the building’ (April Taylor).
We heard of some of the building’s engineering firsts from David Healy who talked about the challenges of using the ‘fractures’, the spaces between the shard facades, to create ventilation systems for the building; the way in which The Shard signalled the start of buildings integrating with transport hubs in the UK; and the building’s mix of uses meaning that different fire codes were literally laid upon one another.
Asked by an audience member about The Shard’s architectural counterintuitive modesty and its spire, the panel reflected on the top of the building’s initial function and the design of the spire. James Goldsmith reflected on how the Shard’s low-iron glass contributes to this sense of modesty whereby the building appears in an ethereal way when it catches the light. He also interpreted the open spire as Renzo Piano’s intention to connect the building to the heavens. They also mentioned that the opening at the top was always meant to be a radiator that naturally cooled the building. But by the time The Shard was built, cooling technology moved on so much that the radiator was no longer required at the top. Asked by the audience if anything would be different about The Shard had the project been commenced today, the panel closed by reflecting on the project as a manifestation of a particular moment in time.
A tall building like The Shard, however you see it, maps onto our own mental geographies too. Whilst there is a myriad of perspectives (and truths) on a building like The Shard, this reflection and event pivoted around just three ‘moments’, three perspectives through which a tall building like The Shard has a sense of place, is researched, and lived.
These reflections were certainly filtered through the context of the event and venue. Nonetheless, hearing the stories and memories of not just our panel but also through chatting to our attendees, and reading an upcoming paper in Urban Studies by Andrew Harris and Tom Wolseley, has made me think a lot about how our reading of The Shard tells us as much about the building as it does ourselves.
You may be a commuter using London Bridge Station every day. PhD Student Ling-Fang Hsu who attended the event shared the above image of The Shard on her way home; it is a diurnal mark of her commute in the morning and homecoming in the evening. You may be a retired couple who have lived in South London, watched The Shard’s construction, and seen the change in the building’s immediate vicinity — its story is part of your life story. And it is like a signature of your life story if, like our panel and some of our attendees, you worked directly on the building. And you, reader, must have clicked on this post too because in some way or the other you are mired by The Shard’s presence, architecture, controversy, plutocracy or something else.
Sidra Ahmed, PhD Human Geography, UCL | sidra.ahmed.17@ucl.ac.uk
Many thanks to Dr Clare Melhuish and Sophie Mepham from UCL Urban Lab for the support for this event as part of work on the Urban Lab’s Urban Verticality research Priority Area. And to the UBEL Doctoral Training Partnership for funding the event. And to UCL School of Management for kindly hosting us at their Canary Wharf campus.
