Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Tanya Gold on eating at the Shard

This photograph brought to you by Dairylea. (Also: Oli Scarff/Getty Images) 
issue 27 July 2013

What to say about the Shard that isn’t said by the fact it is 1,020 feet high and looks like a slightly elongated cheese triangle, and that it is designed as a home and office for those who want nothing more than to live and work in a building that looks like a slightly elongated cheese triangle? I cannot help but think that its architect, who is called Renzo Piano, is a fan of — or possibly secret PR for — Dairylea and was also a very unhappy small boy. (Freud may be over-quoted on the soothing possibilities of size, but he is still right. Small becomes big, and so on, and this baby is so big it is the BIGGEST — I mean tallest — building in the EU. In the EU! Suck on that, Nigel.) It was OK’d by John Prescott when he was Deputy PM, not a man for mirrors, although English Heritage cried tears of baroque dust, and begged him not to do it.

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