THE SHARD: THE VIEW FROM EUROPE'S TALLEST BUILDING

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?

By  Rowan Moore 

The Shard – an object of urban fascination.

Photograph: Katherine Rose for the Observer

'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 citizens are pouring forth their views: it's elegant; it's in the wrong place; it's a piece of international tower envy; it's a citadel of the mega-rich lording it over us morlocks below; it's a London icon. In truth, it is all these things. It is said to be penile, which can only mean that there are some odd-shaped penises out there.

It is also a monument to the hustling abilities of one man, Irvine Sellar. Sellar made his first fortune with what might then have been called groovy fashion boutiques in the 1960s, before moving into property, before going blazingly bust, before starting over again with industrial units in Portsmouth and Warrington. He is the sort of person who gets called a "barrow boy", who had limited experience of building above three storeys before he started on the Shard, and to whom the bigger, more established property companies would condescend.

Sellar bought the site of the future Shard, which is next to London Bridge station and was then occupied by a brownish 1970s building called Southwark Towers, in 1998. He had, he says, no idea it would soon be government policy to support dense development near major transport interchanges. But it was and he spotted a chance. "Railtrack didn't convey the site to me as well as they might have done," he says, "which gave me an opportunity to talk sensibly about building something tall." In other words, he had better lawyers than they had and he got his way.

He got London's newly installed mayor, Ken Livingstone, on his side and Fred Manson, a dynamic planner for the borough of Southwark. Sellar hired Piano, possibly because of criticisms in the press but more probably because he needed someone of Piano's reputation to get planning permission. They made an odd couple – Sellar is stocky and bustling, Piano is tall, well-tailored, and never visibly ruffled. It looked like a marriage of convenience: Piano would lend Sellar his cachet and Sellar would give Piano the chance to build the most conspicuous landmark of his career. Or at least, as few believed the Shard would really be built, Sellar would pay him handsomely to conjure up this spectacular fantasy. Sellar, it was widely assumed, would then sell the undeveloped site for a large profit.

In a few months, Piano ran up his designs. He came up with an elongated pyramidal shape, which he said was inspired by old pictures of spires and ships' masts in the Thames. He talked about its special, extra-white glass and how the canted surfaces would reflect the sky and produce "a nice light presence". Grasping for words at a press conference, he said it would look like a "… a shard … a shard of crystal".

The tower would be a "village", not a monolithic office block. There would be flats, a hotel and restaurants, as well as 570,000 square feet of office space. There would be public viewing galleries, so that Londoners could take possession of it and not just gawp at the exterior. It would be sustainable, to the extent that such buildings can be. Being next to a large railway station would mean that the thousands of people working in it would use trains rather than cars. A "radiator" at the top would use the effect of high winds to help cool the building.

English Heritage objected, in particular because of the Shard's effect on the view from Hampstead Heath, where it would loom over St Paul's. There was a public inquiry, which decided that the tower was a good enough piece of design to overcome such concerns. John Prescott, then the minister in charge of such things, declared that it was "of the highest architectural quality" and granted it planning permission.

Still, there was doubt whether it was possible to finance such a building, in an unfashionable location. Livingstone gave a leg-up to his favourite project by promising to move the offices of Transport for London there. Sellar signed up the Shangri-La hotel group. The credit crunch hit, which might have been terminal to a project so palpably of the profligate boom years, but then the cavalry appeared, in the form of the property arm of the ruling family of Qatar. As their oil wealth means they have no need for credit, the credit crunch did not bother them much.

Sellar now says that "there were moments when things weren't particularly good, but I have never thought that we wouldn't win this". He says he is "not smug or complacent. There is still plenty to do… a beautiful building apart from its architectural merit is not completely beautiful until it's fully let" and they are still looking for tenants for some of the office space. He also says that "it is not about being tall, by the way. It will never be the tallest, but it is the most beautiful". It's not quite believable that height is unimportant to Sellar, although he's right that it's fatuous to chase superlatives, given that the Shard does not quite equal the 82-year-old Chrysler building in New York. It is none the less the tallest building in Europe.

What is there now is more like the designs that Piano produced almost 12 years ago than seemed likely. The ecological radiator has been omitted, on the grounds that it would be expensive and that other equipment would do the same job as well, but otherwise his office has seen off most attempts to cut costs. The glass he wanted is there, as are the public viewing galleries.

He will have his "village", although it will be no Little-Mouldering-on-the-Marsh, and it is hard to see how the social mixing that is presumably part of the attraction of the village idea will take place. The different parts of the building have different lifts and entrances, which reduces the chances of maypole dancing or whatever its modern equivalent might be.

The Shard will have a luxury hotel, and 10 flats near the top, each one of which entirely occupies either one or two floors. These are currently shells, but it does not take much to see that their overflowing abundance of space and views will put them beyond the reach of all but the most hyper of the hyper-rich. Each is rumoured to be worth between £30m and £50m, which means that the 10 of them pretty much pay for the £450m construction cost of the whole building.

So there it is, impressive and with a certain stylishness, even if not quite achieving the "nice, light presence" that Piano promised. It will certainly become – is already – a London landmark and will take its place on T-shirts and tourist shows along with Tower Bridge and the Gherkin. It is made more interesting, if not really a village, by its multiplicity of uses. With its fantasy flats and Hollywood panoramas, it will feed the collective mythology of the city. Rich people may not be fashionable at the moment, but we still like to hear stories about them.

It is also a work of the punk urbanism in which modern London specialises. Other cities would look at the question of increasing development around railway stations and aim for some sort of coherent plan for achieving it. In London, they declared an intention and then gave first prize to the man – Sellar – quickest off the mark. They then dressed the consequences in "outstanding architecture". The Shard was the first and unfortunately the best of such developments. After it came other towers, such as the Strata in Elephant and Castle and the Vauxhall Tower, which repeated the same formula of height next to a station, intrusion on important views, an eco-doodad on top and architecture declared outstanding by John Prescott. The spawn of the Shard come nowhere near to the quality of the original.

So is it worth it? You might say that it depends whether you think London is more like a novel or a painting, about cracking stories and crazy contrasts or about harmonious compositions. Or rather, given that London is in fact a city, and therefore about the play of individual and collective, whether it falls within the hazy rules of the game. It is a thing that pops up everywhere, in views down streets, from parks, from the M25. It is the most conspicuous object in London. It seems to proclaim something significant, yet all it really says is that we have a wonky planning system and that someone called Irvine Sellar was smart enough to exploit it.

I appreciate that anarchy is part of London's DNA, but it is not all of it. I also appreciate Sellar's energy, Piano's skills and the thrills that the Shard offers. I like the view. But not that those skills and energy have gone into making something that, at bottom, is profoundly random.

@ The Guardian