Basic HTML Version
20
City & Village Tours: 0845 812 5000 info@cityandvillagetours.com
Hankey’s Mansions - our first Shard
When the Eiffel Tower opened in Paris in 1889
it divided public opinion. One particularly vocal
critic was the master of the short story, Guy de
Maupassant, a man who sported an impressive
moustache. So it seemed to be very much at odds
with his very vocal opposition during the building
that as soon as it opened the writer took to dining
there each day at the restaurant in the tower. The
mystery was solved when the author explained it
was now the only place in
Paris he couldn’t see the
blasted thing! I feel a bit
like that already about The
Shard, which seems to jolt
into view at every turn.
But I have a theory about
Londoners. I don’t think
we like change very much!
I think our stick-in-the-
mudness is as old as time.
I can picture huddles of
Londoners seeing the spires
of Wren’s brand new city churches or peering up
Ludgate Hill at his great cathedral of Portland stone
and grumbling darkly to each other:
“
London’s not
the same. He’s ruined it!”
At 90 feet tall (27 metres) the White Tower at the
Tower of London, built in 1098, was the tallest
building in England until the mediaeval St Paul’s
Cathedral was finished in 1310 reaching a height of 493
feet (150 metres, I’ve had enough of metres now). For
one year it was the tallest building in the world until it
was eclipsed by Lincoln Cathedral. In the 1500s when
the spire fell off Lincoln Cathedral old St Paul’s was
back as
tallest building until it too lost its spire in a
lightning strike in 1561 and the European title passed
to the cathedral in Strasbourg. When old St Paul’s was
destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666 Southwark Cathedral
became London’s tallest building until Wren’s new
St Paul’s was completed in 1710 and it stayed as our
tallest building right through until 1963 when it was
eclipsed by the Post Office Tower.
Later came the NatWest tower (600 feet Richard Seifert
1981, now called Tower 42) and a decade later Canary
Wharf Tower (771 feet, Cesar Pelli 1991, officially
called One Canada Square). Then the nick-names began:
The Gherkin (591 feet, Sir Norman Foster 2003, Swiss
Re but now officially 30 St. Mary Axe pronounced
Simmery Axe), The Heron (755 feet Kohn Pedersen Fox
Associates, 2011) The Pinnacle (945 feet, K P Fox
again , construction currently on hold due to a lack of
tenants) and The Walkie-Talkie (525 ft, Rafael Vinoly,
20 Fenchurch Street, due for completion in 2014).
Now twelve years after it was first mooted the daddy of
them all is finished, Number 32, London Bridge Street.
It’s very name The Shard began as an insult when
English Heritage objected at the planning stage calling it