You might be able to just survey the thing. If you've got a good floor plan and can borrow some surveying equipment, you should be able to take angles to the top and just work out the height that way. Your best bet would probably be to use averaged GPS measurements, or existing surveys, to get an accurate horizontal distance to the spire, then take the angle from the base to the spire and work out some trig. You might be able to get away with just a plain camera, if you can correct for the lens distortion.
This is probably the best way to actually figure out the actual height of the Shard (if one can properly figure out whether the Shard has a well-defined and level base).
Fascinating! It looks like there's a significant discrepancy between the highest spot a person can stand on the building, and the highest pointy-bits of the building top. Plausibly ~4m? You have a few more options than just web search, since you live nearby:
-
Have you gone up to the viewing platform (https://www.the-shard.com/about/level-guide/) and read any informational plaques that might be posted there? If you have a phone that tells you your elevation above sea level, what's it say when you're on that observation deck? Is there a guide or guard on-site who might know enough about the building to answer questions on it? (I know you say you can't go up but it looks like tickets are available? https://www.theviewfromtheshard.com/book-tickets/)
-
Have you chatted with a librarian at a local library about it? They might have ideas for non-internet resources that could contain info on how tall each part of the building is. I'm thinking specifically that there were probably public hearings when the building was being planned, and those hearings probably involved diagrams of the building, but those diagrams would be more the domain of a historical society than current city records after construction.
-
Do any local museums have exhibits about the city's recent history that might include more info? If a museum even seems like it ought to have info, try dropping by a few times and chatting with the humans.
-
The fire department probably knows more than the internet about exactly what's going on inside the building, since they have to understand its system of standpipes, fire doors, etc to deal with emergencies in it. If you ever get to chatting with a friendly outreach person from them who has some time to spare, consider asking for their advice on finding out how buildings like that are measured.
-
Are amateur radio clubs a thing in your area? In my experience, they contain exactly the sorts of people who would know where you can find conclusive sources on this sort of interesting engineering trivia.
* Does the top of the building ever cast a shadow onto any park, street, or other publicly accessible location? If you know the exact date and time and location of the shadow of the deck and the shadow of the tip, you can combine that with a topo map and go full Aristotle to triangulate the heights of the parts that are casting the shadow. GPS is likely too imprecise to find the exact shadow locations, but a photograph of the shadow which lines it up with map-visible landmarks like building corners, utility poles, etc could be used.
All good suggestions! But I'm probably not interested enough to, like, leave my flat and talk to people to investigate :p
(I actually did ask a friend who works there if there were any plaques or anything. He said he'd look next time he was in the office, but I think he probably forgot.)
I hadn't realized there was an open-air viewing platform, I thought the highest the public could go was a few floors below the roof. Still, it looks to me like there's a lot more than 4 m from there to the tip.
If you're on the open-air viewing platform, it might be feasible to use something like a sextant or shadow lengths to figure out the height from the platform to the top, and then use a different tool to figure out the height of the platform.
From the photo of the tower's shadow in this article, I have two further guesses about the relative heights of the viewing platform and the pointy bits:
- At some time in the year, the building's shadow will probably show the viewing deck height and pointy bit height, so they could in theory be triangulated
- Due to the surrounding urban development, it looks wildly unlikely that the shadow will hit any surface it's actually useful to measure it on.
It might not be legal to use from the viewing platform to the pointy bits, and it might not work in broad daylight, but a laser distance meter with ~50m range can be had for around $20 at the low end and fits in a pocket ;)
A sextant is much less likely to cause problems by interfering with other tech, though.
They will in fact stop you from taking fancy laser measuring kit to the top of the Shard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckcdqlo3pYc&t=792s.
Ah. Perhaps you could wait till someone from out of town is visiting, and use them as an excuse to go up to the platform... that's how I usually make it to local tourist spots =)
So actually, a 4-6 m difference between corners is totally reasonable; what counts as "ground level" when you're inside a building like that?
CTBUH defines height usually from the “level of the lowest, significant, open-air, pedestrian entrance".
So in the context of determining the height, the ground level would be the lower side.
According to Wikipedia, the Shard (the tallest building in the UK) stands "309.6 meters (1,016 feet) high". I put this in my Anki deck as "Height of the Shard / 310m", but I was saying "height" to mean "tallness" (because I don't much like that word) and I had assumed Wikipedia was using it the same way. So I thought the Shard was 310 m tall.
But according to Bron Maher in Londonist,
Is that so? I was curious enough to investigate1, but it turns out I don't really know how to.
(Also: Maher says the Shard is 306 m, not 309 m, not "not 310 m". And he gets 309 from Wikipedia, quoting it on the list of highest points in London, which talks about "the 309 m (1,014 ft) tall Shard". Where did those extra 60 cm go? The article on the Shard itself also has that number, in the "records" section near the bottom, but the infobox on the right has 309.6/1,016. So is it 306 m, 309 m, or 309.6 m?)
The boring investigation
The first thing to do2 is to look at Wikipedia's sources. It doesn't have one on the list of highest points, and it doesn't have one in the "records" section. The infobox does have a source for the height, which is on skyscraperpage.com. It lists the spire at 1,016 ft or 309.7 m, yet another number! There are various drawings, all giving the roof at 304.2 m and the spire at 309.7 m. (1,016 ft is 309.68 m, but 309.6 m is 1015.75 ft and 309.7 m is 1,016.08 ft. So if you convert 309.6 m to feet and back to meters, you could get 309.7 m. But wikipedia shouldn't be taking 309.6 m from that page.)
Skyscraperpage lists the source for the height as http://www.the-shard.com, and the about page on that site says: "How tall is The Shard? The Shard is 309.6 metres, or 1,016 feet, high and is Western Europe's tallest building." You'd certainly expect the Shard's official webpage to be right about this, but also it says "high" not "tall" so it could be a misdirect.
Next3, does Maher have any sources? For 306 m tallness he just says "most sources" give that figure. For 3 m above sea level, I think that comes from its height at the top. He quotes someone at Ordnance Survey saying the top of the Shard is 308.9 m above sea level, which gives around 3 m for the base.
Most of my research was just googling things. Search terms included "how tall is the shard", "height above sea level of the shard", "the shard architectural drawings", "uk contour lines" and "ctbuh the shard" (inspired by one of the earlier results). Here are some of the things I found.
The London Pass: "The Shard is 306 metres tall, however if you measure all the way up to the tip, it's 310 metres". I don't know what point below the tip it's talking about. It could be roof versus spire, but the skyscraperpage drawings give a different roof height.
The Skyscraper Center: height ("measured from the level of the lowest, significant, open-air, pedestrian entrance") is "306 m / 1,004 ft", both "to tip" and "architectural". (The difference being things like flagpoles and antennae, which the Shard doesn't have. The highest occupied floor is "244.3 m / 802 ft".) Seems like the kind of site that knows what it's talking about. Doesn't cite sources, but the drawing they have is labeled a CTBUH drawing, and that also sounds like the kind of organization that knows what it's talking about, giving me a new google search term.
SkyscraperCity: says both "309m" and "310m" with no apparent shame. But also, that link points to page 833 of 1385 of a discussion thread4, and at this particular point people are discussing its height above sea level. (And comparing to the then-future "The Pinnacle", which became 22 Bishopsgate.) It seems the Shard is level with The Thames nearby, which at that point is tidal. Some commenters think that means it's at sea level at least some of the time, but someone else points out no: "A river can be tidal some distance above high water mark for the sea. Consider what happens when the tide comes in - the sea effectively "comes up" the river mouth, which will slow down flow of water down the river, which will start backing up. As it backs up, the level upstream will increase as less water is getting out. Thus a river can be tidal above the high tide point of the sea itself." Makes sense to me.
Someone else says it's 16 m above sea level according to Google Maps, but I can't find that info on Google Maps myself. (But it does label it as "306m-high glass & steel tower with views", if I'm zoomed in the right amount. I can't see that string anywhere else.)
Another says it's 16 m above sea level, according to "the Ordinance Datum figures". Presumably they mean Ordnance Datum; that's not a source, their point is to talk about "what is the zero-point that this is 16 m above".5 (In different comments they say 16 or 17 m, but I'm pretty sure they mean 16.)
On the next page, someone links to a nearby ordnance survey benchmark which seemingly puts the ground there at 4.563 m above sea level. (But we get 3dp precision for the height of the mark above sea level, and only 1dp precision for its height above ground level, which is sus. Probably best stick to 4.5 m above sea level, and then the Shard would be somewhat close to that - unless there are steps or a steep hill in between, and I'm sure there are some nearby.) (The benchmarks site doesn't have an FAQ entry for "what actually are these things we've catalogued so painstakingly", so here's Ordnance Survey explianing them. I think "cut mark" just means "we marked the location by making a cut in the wall somewhere".)
Someone else on the next page says Bing Maps has an Ordnance Survey overlay. Looking at that: the Shard is contained in a fairly small contour line, but that line isn't marked with a height. The next-nearest contour I can find is marked 10 (which is in meters), so this one could be either 5 or 15, making both 16 m and "somewhat close to 4.5 m" plausible, which is frankly ridiculous.
There's this topographic map. It doesn't have the Shard actually labeled, but clicking various points inside its outline I can get between 15 and 20 m. I don't think there's actually a 4-6 m difference between different corners of the base of the Shard, so this seems unreliable. And points near the benchmark seem to be about 12-15 m. It's plausibly using a different zero point than Ordnance Survey?
I couldn't find any more topographic data for free. This site might help, but I'd need to register for an account and I'm not sure that would be enough.
This pdf hosted on the CTBUH domain says 310 m height. There's also this pdf which doesn't give a height, but does have a ground configuration table; we have "made ground" from +4.7 m OD to 0.0 m OD, matching the OS benchmark. Other pdfs in the search result say 306 m, 306 m, and 1,016 ft / 310 m.
Wikiarquitecture: 310 m.
This drawing: 306 m.
And that's it for googling.
Oh! This is kind of embarrassing to admit, but even though I go by the Shard pretty often I don't have a good sense of the road layout near it, or indeed which building in the road layout is the Shard. (When you're next to it and not looking up, it's much like any other building.) But scrolling around street view for a bit to refresh my memory, I realize it has ground-level exits on at least two different floors, with an outside escalator that's probably something around 10 m elevation. (On screen it's about 4.5x the height of that guy, so I'd guess a bit under. And I think I count 36 escalator steps, this says typical escalator step rise is 8 1/2 in, which makes 7.77 m.) There's also a pedestrian walkway going underneath the level of the upper street, but that's too wide to think of as a bridge. So actually, a 4-6 m difference between corners is totally reasonable; what counts as "ground level" when you're inside a building like that? Still, the topographic map disagrees with OS about the benchmark too.
I searched HM Land Registry for the Shard, but the results don't give me anything interesting. It was a long shot.
And my final source is the aviation charts for nearby London City Airport. (Thanks to Tobias at Zurihac who suggested these and showed me where to find them.) They're on this site which doesn't like direct linking, so you have to go to "Part 3 - Aerodromes" -> "AD 2 Aerodromes" -> "EGLC London City" -> "EGLC AD 2.24 charts related to an aerodrome" -> "Control zone and control area chart", and that gives you this pdf. The Shard isn't named, but there's something there with height marked as "1015 (1008)" in its rough location, so let's assume it's that. This is presumably in feet, and Tobias thinks the 1008 is height above ground. This matches what is presumably the Crystal Palace transmitter south and slightly east, at "1087 (732)", or "331 (223)" in metres, which is close to Maher's figures for it. (Maher has it 222 m above the ground, but I'm not investigating that.) So in metres this is 309.4 (307.2), but since that's rounded it could be 309.2-309.5 (307.1-307.4).
The exciting conclusion
So… I'm not sure, really. I think my best guess is that it's 306 m tall according to some perfectly reasonable way to measure that, possibly the most reasonable. This is consistent with (i.e. lower than) the heights given by both OS and the aviation charts, and those are close enough that the difference might be caused by differing ideas of sea level. And it's the only number I remember seeing lower than those, other than the aviation charts.
If this is right then it's about 3 m above sea level at the ground, which is close enough to the benchmark height that I can believe it. I don't think I believe the "16 m above sea level" value; even a combination of "confused about which street level we're measuring from" and "differing ideas of sea level" seems like it couldn't give that. I also don't think I believe the 4.7 m from the ground configuration table - that table suggests that before development, the ground there was within 5 cm of sea level, and in particular below the nearby Thames most or all of the time. Not inconceivable, but in context I doubt.
This makes the aviation charts wrong about its tallness, which is my biggest sticking point here. But I'm not sure how reliable to expect them to be about that. Height seems far more relevant to their interests than tallness, and they could easily be using a ground-height measurement at some nearby point.
I think the funniest way to resolve this for good, would be for someone to announce plans for a 307 m tall building with its base 4 m above sea level, and specifically claim it as taller than the Shard. The skyscraper fandom will presumably erupt into civil war, but when the dust settles we can hope they'll have uncovered the truth.
Why is this answer so hard to find? It feels like the sort of question that has a single definite answer that you can just look up, but clearly not.
It's probably relevant that I can't easily check for myself. I suppose I could use a sextant or look at shadow lengths. But those will both work best if I'm far away, and then other buildings make it harder plus I might no longer be at ground level. I don't think I can even get to the top, let alone dangle a tape measure from it. I think GPS gives me height above sea level, but I'm not sure how precise it is, how accurate it is (especially when surrounded by buildings), and again I can't go to the top. So if two sources disagree, there's no obvious way for me (or probably most people) to check which if either is correct. But why do sources disagree in the first place?
Sometimes with tall buildings the issue is that there are multiple things that could be considered "the top". Two sources suggest that might be happening here. But they still disagree, and the Skyscraper Center suggests it's not.
Might it be that different sources define sea level differently? Perhaps, but this isn't enough by itself unless someone used different sea levels for the top and the bottom. I'm not sure how much difference we can expect this to explain.
How about forgetting the difference between height and tallness? This does seem plausible to me. I could imagine someone standing at the top of the Shard with a device telling them they're (say) 309.6 m above sea level, and forgetting to also use that device on the ground. It seems to roughly fit, but not closely enough to be conclusive and of course none of the numbers are sourced well enough for this error to be detectable in the methodology.
I could then imagine those two heights getting rounded to 309 m and 310 m respectively; or 309.6 m getting truncated to 309 m; or 306 m tallness getting rounded to 310 m; and that could explain some of the numbers I see. Converting meters to feet and back can also generate new numbers.
It's also possible that different sources are counting from different bottoms. I don't think there's a street-level entrance that would get us above 306 m, but maybe including a basement.
I wonder if plans changed during construction, reducing the intended tallness? But I can't find any evidence of that.
This article on building the Shard points out that buildings shorten during construction. It sounds like that was accounted for, but plausibly a pre-shrinking height somehow got mistaken for the finished height? (It also has a picture which makes me think that the difference between "highest floor" and "actual tip" is at least 20 m.)
And I can't rule out measurement error, either. I don't know how OS decided the tip was 308.9 m above sea level, or the aviation charts people decided it was 1,015 ft, but while I consider them fairly reliable-seeming organizations, it sure seems possible that someone misread or miscalibrated an instrument.
But ultimately I don't have a satisfying answer here, either.
The main point of the article is to teach us that there's a point in London higher than the tip of the Shard. I find that mildly interesting, but not very surprising, since I'm aware of the concept of hills. But "actually this building is less tall than you think because people keep giving its height instead of its tallness" is… kinda surprising, if true, but in a not-very-surprising way. ↩
Not the first thing I actually did, but I feel a bit embarrassed I didn't think of it sooner. ↩
Also not actually next. ↩
It's 22,770 posts as of December 2022. I guess the skyscraper fandom means business. ↩
Apparently the zero point actually changed in 2016, and now things are defined to be about 25mm higher above sea level than they used to be. ↩