A trip up the Shard yields a 60-mile-wide panorama spanning London. But is its haphazard journey from pipe dream to reality a good thing for the capital?`Save us from a poke in the eye with a sharp stick,` I wrote in the London Evening Standard, in 2000, when property developer Irvine Sellar unveiled plans for a 1,400ft-high pointy cylinder above London Bridge station. I went on to say that if he wanted to build something this big, which would be visible all over London, the least Sellar could do was hire a decent architect.The sharp stick is now there and a little while ago I found myself high up it, wondering at a 60-mile-wide sweep in which I could see Southend-on-Sea in one direction and Ascot in the other, or, rather, smudges I was told were these pleasure grounds of poor and rich. You can see more clearly Heathrow`s Terminal Five and the Queen Elizabeth II bridge in Dartford and Hertfordshire and the North Downs.You can see, in other words, the whole of London, until now an unencompassable splodge that could last have been captured in a single view perhaps 200 years ago, to its perimeter and beyond. Close to, familiar and not-small objects, such as the Gherkin and HMS Belfast, look like large toys. It is both implausible and real, something well-known seen from an unprecedented place. It`s hard to know what to do except gawp.The stick is now named the Shard and has been redesigned by celebrated Genovese architect Renzo Piano, co-architect with Richard Rogers of the Pompidou Centre in Paris, who replaced the less glamorous firm of Broadway Malyan. The tower has also shrunk, to just over 1,000ft, as the Civil Aviation Authority was worried about planes crashing into it.It is still big enough to be an object of urban fascination. A fox, a crane driver, base jumpers and other adventurers have all made headlines by getting to the top (or, in some cases, allegedly so). Unauthorised photos of the view from the top have gone viral, or viral-ish. Hacks and ci ...
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