16th March 2021 12:02

It had been a gloomy and busy time. I had high hopes of tracing this part of it but the weather wasn’t playing ball. The 16th started like much of the rest of the last couple of weeks, cloudy, and the brief bursts of midday Sun there were occurred while I was working. With the shadow off the View I was stuck for a few weeks.

On the 16th though the cloud was patchy and fast-moving, and I thought I’d risk it. The cloud gathered as I left the flat, like delinquent birds above a freshly-cleaned car. There’d been previous miracles and sunbeams of course and the spring air had been welcomingly mild for a week so I didn’t mind the walk, but by the time I got down there it was clear nothing was going to happen. The cloud had thickened so much that there wasn’t even a diffuse brighter spot to aim at, and the location for this shot was chosen more from the plot than anything else. So, no dice, and no more winter GMT marks for the map. Maybe the spring would lift my spirits and help fill the gaps on the last leg of the analemma…

27th February 2021 12:00

OK so this really is the last one. Is that a faint tip of a tip on the very bottom of Adelaide House just above the filmstrip of images? Well maybe.

It occured to me, it should be possible to make a stop-motion animation of all the various Shard tip shadows over the winter. How hard could it be?!

How hard could it be to make it look good..? Still, you get the idea.

Incidentally, weather nerds, this day the pressure was at 1042 millibars, about as high as I’ve ever seen it here. No wonder it was clear.

26th February 2021 12:00

Maybe I can eke out one more screengrab? Certainly there’s not a lot of point trying to get the actual shot of the Shard, as the double-pronged tip is just visible here on the front of the building, far above the ground.

The building in question, since we’re looking at it, is Adelaide House. When it was completed in 1925 it was the tallest office building in the City at an then-imposing 43 metres high, and the first in the City to use the steel frame technique that led to ever-taller buildings around it and around the world. Apparently it used to have an 18-hole putting course on its roof, which would make a fine addition to the current version.

Fittingly for its location on King William Street, it was named after said King’s wife, Adelaide (as was the city in South Australia).

24th February 2021 12:00

Having tracked the shadow on the View from the Shard and consulted the plot too, I thought I knew pretty much exactly where this was going to be. But despite the second half of February basically being a northward move with a bare quarter-degree swerve to the west, I still went to the wrong side of the road.

Turns out those quarter degrees really count when the shadow’s projected over the City’s streets. So the alignment here was from over the road from 13th, and a good way south too. It was south even of the ugly metal and concrete barriers thrown up to prevent car attacks, and very nearly too far east for me to photograph, as east of this bit of London Bridge is a precipitous drop to an unloved and unwelcoming alley. I leant out as far as I could and it was still slightly misaligned. Still, it’s better than having it blocked by buildings. This will likely be the last time I can match it to the View from the Shard too, and you can just about see the shadow of the tip on the edge of the building at bottom left:

It doesn’t look like there’ll be many more days of the lazy webcam screengrab…

13th February 2021 12:00

Finally! It’d been a long cold winter watching the shadow sweep across tall buildings, it at last it appeared again from ground level, just where I expected after the shot on 11th.

It was a more fortuitous capture than that dry prediction implies though. I’d arranged to meet a friend for outdoor lockdown exercise (a socially distanced walk to Borough Market), and it was meant to be a bit earlier than this. As it turned out, all the extra layers we needed to put on pushed the time back so much the shot was on. She didn’t know about this of course, so as we were approaching I was checking the time and pondering how to explain it. We arrived at the spot at nine minutes to twelve.

You can dress up my explanation any way you like, but it boiled down to “Can we stand still on the street in freezing temperatures for nine minutes so I can take a photo of the Sun through the top of the Shard? It’s for a thing.” Bemusement gave way to accommodation gave way to frostbite, and while I could still use my fingers I took the picture from just south of the huge wooden box they’ve put there to hide a construction site.

I had high hopes of this shot being one in which I could see us on the View from the Shard shot, but it wasn’t to be.

We didn’t linger long after midday for obvious reasons, and perhaps the camera doesn’t take the shot at bang on twelve. Plus we would have been little more than a pair of pixels at this range (with a couple of pixels of social distance between us of course). I’d mulled the idea of wearing a retroreflective T-shirt for this series of shots to show up on the View as a bright gleam, but it was not the day for such things.

Still, after a long break watching it remotely, it was good to see it again. I celebrated the capture by buying a piece of Roquefort the size of a child’s head. It was still going, just, by the time of the next one.

11th February 2021 12:00

There then followed a couple of cloudy weeks of solid rain. By the time the shadow was visible again it had shifted a lot, and, and, looked like it was visible from the road. The tip is falling on the western pavement of King William Street there, which opened the tantalising possibility of seeing it from the ground again if the weather behaved.

It’s worth noting this was the coldest spell of the year (to date). On the 8th it didn’t get above freezing all day and it snowed long and hard, settled and lasted for days. You can’t see it here but there was still a fair bit on the ground. The pressure was high and getting higher too, and I had high hopes of a sighting at the weekend two days later.

The shot the next day, incidentally, was ruined by a passing cloud. 11:55am fine, 12:05am fine. In between? Nope. Bah.

25th January 2021 12:00

You’d not guess from this view that the pressure was still below average and there was still snow on the ground in sheltered spots. Curious. The shadow doesn’t move much in four days, tracking here over the northwestern-heading part of King William Street. No chance of seeing this alignment from street level. Given the great age of the City, the name does raise the question: which King William?

The Fourth, it turns out. Goodness knows what was here before, but this road was only built between 1829-1835, and it was named after the King at the time. An old man at his coronation, he reigned for less than seven years. Mirroring this short reign, there was a tube station on the road for a brief period too – King William Street station was on what’s now the Northern Line, and was the terminus of a line with the next station south at the still extant Borough. It opened in December 1890 but lasted less than ten years, before being closed and replaced by the labyrinthine Bank to the northwest.

The Williams have all had pretty short reigns, with William I, the Conqueror (or Bastard), being comfortably the longest at coming up for 21 years, 7563 days according to this site. It’s said he was injured by the pommel of his saddle and never recovered. His son made it 4710 days before being mysteriously and totally accidentally shot with an arrow while out hunting (on horseback) with the very-soon-to-be King Henry I. William III (of “and Mary” fame – England ruled by an Orange, and all that) made it a bit longer, 4770 days, before dying from complications of falling from his horse, Sorrel, who tripped in a mole hole. I’m not sure how superstitious the future King William V is, but Kate might want to keep him from the stables. If it’s of any consolation to him, William IV of the short street and short-lived tube station died of heart failure, with no horses in attendence.

23rd January 2021 12:00

Well you can just about make this out. Rare to get two consecutive sunny middays in London in winter, and it hadn’t moved far, but hey, they all count.

Unlike the superficially similar 7th/9th pair, this and the day before were under very different skies. Low pressure hoovered its way across the country and those are rain clouds on the horizon. The next day it fell as snow.