The Shard: Renzo Piano's Menu Sketch, Qatari Money and Romeo the Fox

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The Shard began in 1998, when developer Irvine Sellar eyed Southwark Towers, a 1970s office block beside London Bridge Station, after a government white paper encouraged tall buildings near transport hubs. In spring 2000 he met architect Renzo Piano for lunch in Berlin, where Piano, who disliked conventional skyscrapers, sketched a spire rising from the Thames on the back of the menu, drawing on railway lines, ship masts and Canaletto's paintings of London church spires. English Heritage warned it would be a shard of glass through the heart of historic London, handing the tower its name, and after a public inquiry John Prescott approved it in 2003 as a design of the highest quality.

Demolition preparations began in September 2007 as the credit crunch hit, the construction price from Mace rose from £350 million to almost £435 million, and in 2008 Qatari investors paid £150 million for an 80% stake; Qatar now owns 95%. Redesigned after the NIST report on the World Trade Center, the 309.6 metre tower has a post-tensioned concrete core, sways up to 400 millimetres and was built top down, a first for the UK. In 2011 workers found a fox, later named Romeo, living near the top. Completed in 2012, its 95 storeys hold clinics, offices, an Al Jazeera studio, the Shangri-La hotel, apartments and the UK's highest public viewing gallery.

• The 500-ton, 66-metre spire was test-assembled on an airfield in North Yorkshire before going to London.
• Its 11,000 panes of glass cover an area equal to almost eight football pitches.
• The core passed One Canada Square in 2010, ending its 18-year run as Britain's tallest building.
• George King-Thompson free-climbed the exterior in 2019 and was sentenced to six months in a youth offenders institution.
• Six Greenpeace climbers spent 16 hours scaling it in 2013 to protest Shell's Arctic drilling.