Qualla: The Shard https://qualla.com/the-shard en-us © 2026 Bendyline Wed, 08 Jul 2026 02:40:15 GMT Qualla serial false Qualla support@bendyline.com yes https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/p/v/the-shard-wp/hero-small.webp Qualla: The Shard https://qualla.com/the-shard The Shard: Introduction https://qualla.com/the-shard/ Photo credit Au Morandarte from London, Middlesex, England, CC BY-SA 2.0. Renzo Piano sketched it on the back of a restaurant menu over lunch in Berlin in the spring of 2000. The Italian architect had been telling London entrepreneur Irvine Sellar what he thought of conventional skyscrapers, which was not much. Then he flipped the menu over, took out a pen, and drew a slender pointed sculpture rising out of the River Thames - tapered to a needle at the top, faceted like a piece of broken glass catching the sky. The finished building stands 309.6 metres above London Bridge station, the tallest in the United Kingdom and Western Europe. It has 11,000 panes of angled glass that change colour with the weather - sometimes silver, sometimes lavender, sometimes nearly the same shade as a London raincloud. It is one of those rare buildings that looks more or less the same in the architect's first sketch as it does today.

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Image: Au Morandarte from London, Middlesex, England | CC BY-SA 2.0

]]> Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/p/v/the-shard-wp/gcpv-the-shard-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full The Shard: A Shard of Glass Through the Heart of London https://qualla.com/the-shard/ Photo credit Jordiferrer, CC BY-SA 4.0. Not everyone wanted the building. English Heritage opposed planning permission, warning that the tower would cast a shadow over views of St Paul's Cathedral and Tower Bridge. They called the design a shard of glass through the heart of historic London, intended as an insult, and ...

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Image: Jordiferrer | CC BY-SA 4.0

]]> Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/p/v/the-shard-wp/gcpv-the-shard-a-shard-of-glass-through-the-heart-of-london.mp3 0:06 2 full The Shard: The Qatari Rescue https://qualla.com/the-shard/ Photo credit Acabashi, CC BY-SA 4.0. The project nearly died in the autumn of 2007. Sellar and his original partners had secured 196 million pounds in interim funding from Nationwide Building Society and the Icelandic bank Kaupthing Singer and Friedlander. Then the credit markets seized up. The whole development loo...

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Image: Acabashi | CC BY-SA 4.0

]]> Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/p/v/the-shard-wp/gcpv-the-shard-the-qatari-rescue.mp3 0:06 3 full The Shard: Top-Down Construction and a Fox Named Romeo https://qualla.com/the-shard/ Photo credit Bjmullan, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Shard introduced building methods that had never been tried in the United Kingdom. Top-down construction allowed the foundations to be excavated downward while the core was being built upward, a process more usual in Asia than in Britain. By March 2010 the concrete core was r...

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Image: Bjmullan | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/p/v/the-shard-wp/gcpv-the-shard-top-down-construction-and-a-fox-named-romeo.mp3 0:06 4 full The Shard: What Is Inside https://qualla.com/the-shard/ Photo credit Michaelmas1957, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Shard contains 72 habitable floors arranged as a vertical city. Floors 2 to 28 hold offices - 26 floors of them, occupied by some 32 companies including Al Jazeera English's main London hub for the network's English-language broadcasting, Warwick Business School's London camp...

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Image: Michaelmas1957 | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/p/v/the-shard-wp/gcpv-the-shard-what-is-inside.mp3 0:06 5 full The Shard: Climbers, Jumpers, and a Doctor in a Motorbike https://qualla.com/the-shard/ Photo credit Mariordo (Mario Roberto Durán Ortiz), CC BY-SA 3.0. The Shard's profile has made it a magnet for the kind of people who like to climb things they should not climb. In December 2011, before the building was even finished, a group of recreational explorers called the Place Hackers evaded security and climbed one of the construction ...

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Image: Mariordo (Mario Roberto Durán Ortiz) | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/p/v/the-shard-wp/gcpv-the-shard-climbers-jumpers-and-a-doctor-in-a-motorbike.mp3 0:06 6 full