The Shard

About this place

From level 72, roughly 244 metres up with no roof between you and the sky, Tower Bridge shrinks to a toy almost at your feet and the boats on the Thames become moving dots. This is the tallest building in Britain: 310 metres of leaning glass that Renzo Piano designed to look like a shard deliberately left unfinished, inaugurated in 2012 with the viewing deck opening in early 2013, and majority-owned by the State of Qatar. Most of it is offices, the Shangri-La hotel and restaurants; the part that concerns you is The View, on floors 68 to 72. The entrance is on Joiner Street, welded to London Bridge station (Northern and Jubilee lines plus National Rail), so do not go hunting for a grand lobby. Two fast lifts take about a minute to reach the glassed-in floors 68 and 69, then you climb to 72, where the glass walls stop short and the wind finds you. The view is a full circle: Parliament and the London Eye to the west, the Tower and Tower Bridge close below, the City's cluster across the river, and on a clear day Wembley and Canary Wharf. Nobody hurries you out, so the best trick here is to book about forty-five minutes before sunset and get the city by day, then lit up by night, on one ticket. Sunset slots sell out days ahead in summer; in winter the sun is gone before four, so anything after mid-afternoon is a night view, and a genuinely good one. Note that outside summer the deck closes on Mondays and Tuesdays and opens only at midday or one o'clock on other weekdays, so check the opening calendar before you plan. Fog and rain kill the whole idea, but there is a View Guarantee: if you cannot make out three of five named landmarks, you get a free return voucher valid for at least three months. Claim it on the day, before you leave the building. Pricing is dynamic. An adult ticket starts at around GBP 28 booked ahead for quiet slots and rises to around 37 for popular ones, more still if you turn up without a booking. Children's tickets start at about GBP 10; under-fours go free. The competition is real: Sky Garden and Horizon 22 in the City are both free with a booking, and Horizon 22 actually stands about ten metres higher than the Shard's deck, though behind glass. But they stand among the towers, so you look at the Shard rather than from it, whereas from here the whole City sits in one frame with the river. On a tight budget the free decks are enough; if you want open air and the widest frame from the tallest building in the country, the Shard earns its price. For families: lifts reach every level, so pushchairs are fine, there are toilets at the top, and children love watching trains slide into the station below. No prayer room for visitors is advertised in the building. The restaurants and bars on floors 31 to 33 need no deck ticket, but they are adult-oriented venues with smart dress codes and minimum spends at the bars, so count them out; the calmer family option is afternoon tea at the Shangri-La on floor 35, expensive but the same view with a chair and a table. Borough Market, with its many food stalls including halal ones, is a five-minute walk for lunch afterwards.