Tanya Gold on eating at the Shard

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. Ha! Too late. Poor Southwark sweats under the glinting cheese-wrapper, an immense symbol of how the Germans can’t get us any more because we have the BIGGEST — I mean tallest — building in the EU. In the EU! (Except we don’t. It belongs, inevitably, to Qatar.) I refuse to wheel out Sigmund’s ghost again. We all know what is going on here. The architect knows, the architect’s mother knows, and the six girls from Greenpeace who are climbing the Shard to protest against Shell drilling in the Arctic even as I inspect its Chinese restaurant know. (At least that is their story.) So do the police, waiting, drooling, on the ground.