At midday on 15th December I wasn’t actually hovering on the webcam page hammering F5 like a loon – as I said before I didn’t know about this until 8th January. But as it’s the first date in the image sequence, in here it goes. This is what the full screen image looks like:
It really is a heck of a view from up there (if you know where to look, you can see where my flat is out there in shadow at centre right). The Shard isn’t tall by modern international standards, but it’s a good deal taller than anything else in London, and that’s a rarely-seen wide horizon for an enormous city.
But never mind my flat and the horizon, all I cared about was the big dark spike at centre left. The Shard looks like a gnomon at the best of times, and these, well, for this project this was the best of times. However, I still had to mark this on the map. This is less easy than a quick screen grab.
The City’s churches and towers give some clues, but they’re surrounded with nondescript low-rises with identical slate grey rooves. I can see it’s pointing straight at, yet not quite reaching, a big green glass thing, and almost exactly straight east of a white churchy thing, but this was going to require some Google Maps work.
Google Maps fortunately has a handy 3D feature, where you can pick your point of view and rotate and zoom your way around the City, all still handily marked up. So you can recreate pretty much exactly this view. I mean:
A bit more zooming and clicking and it turns out the churchy spire is the east end of the Royal Exchange Shopping Centre, and the dark green roof over the road from it (the road being called Royal Exchange), is home to Louis Vuitton and a wine bar called Oeno House. I’ve been to neither of these but I’m going to stick a blue winter marker on the map right there.
Outside this building, incidentally, is a statue of George Peabody. In 1862 he was the first ever American to be made a Freeman of the City of London. As the only other to receive the honour is Dwight D Eisenhower, it’s clear he was held in high regard for his financial acumen and later philanthropy. Even more incidentally, the housing association Peabody evolved from the Peabody Trust he founded in 1862, and is now one of London’s largest housing associations. Philanthropy is likely not the word that would spring to the lips of their tenants and shared owners, and I hope the esteemed gentleman knows nothing of the things (not) done in his name.
Shard Analemma 