The Shard

Construction began in March 2009 on Renzo Piano's design for a tower rising directly above London Bridge station, the centrepiece of the wider London Bridge Quarter regeneration of a stretch of the south bank that had been neglected for decades. Piano is said to have sketched the concept on the back of a restaurant menu, drawing on the masts of tall ships once moored along the Thames and the slender spires that punctuate the London skyline in Canaletto's eighteenth-century paintings of the city.

Engineers used a "top-down" construction method, building the tower's first floors while excavation of the basement was still under way beneath them, to save time on the tightly constrained site. The steel frame topped out in March 2012, when a 66-metre glass spire weighing around 500 tonnes was winched into place, and the building was formally inaugurated that July, becoming the tallest building in the United Kingdom — and, at the time, in the European Union — at just over 309 metres.

The tower's faceted skin is made up of roughly 11,000 individual glass panels, angled to catch the light differently through the day and give the building its shard-like silhouette. It rises 95 storeys in total, though only 72 are habitable floors — the tapering uppermost section is structure rather than usable space, which is part of why the building looks so needle-thin from a distance.

Below the public viewing floors, the tower doubles as a vertical neighbourhood: floors 34 to 52 house the five-star Shangri-La Hotel, one of the highest hotels in Europe when it opened, with offices filling most of the floors beneath and a clutch of restaurants and bars scattered through the lower levels — meaning most of the building's "residents" never so much as see the observation deck above them.

Tickets are timed and best booked online in advance, especially for sunset slots, which are the most popular and typically the first to sell out. The Shard sits directly above London Bridge station, making it very easy to combine with an afternoon at Borough Market or a walk over to Tower Bridge nearby.

Because the view depends entirely on clear weather, every ticket comes with a View Guarantee: if low cloud blocks the sightline to at least three of five named landmarks — including St Paul's, Tower Bridge and the London Eye — staff issue a free voucher, valid for several months, to come back another day. It's worth asking about at the exit if visibility was poor during your visit.