Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: How tall is the Shard, really?, published by philh on June 23, 2023 on LessWrong.

According to Wikipedia, the Shard (the tallest building in the UK) stands "309.6 meters (1,016 feet) high". I put this in my Anki deck as "Height of the Shard / 310m", but I was saying "height" to mean "tallness" (because I don't much like that word) and I had assumed Wikipedia was using it the same way. So I thought the Shard was 310 m tall.

But according to Bron Maher in Londonist,

most sources put the building’s tallness - that is, its length base-to-tip - at about 306 metres. The last three metres come from the height of the ground on which the Shard is built. So while its height is indeed 309 metres above sea level, the Shard is only 306 metres tall.

Is that so? I was curious enough to investigate1, but it turns out I don't really know how to.

(Also: Maher says the Shard is 306 m, not 309 m, not "not 310 m". And he gets 309 from Wikipedia, quoting it on the list of highest points in London, which talks about "the 309 m (1,014 ft) tall Shard". Where did those extra 60 cm go? The article on the Shard itself also has that number, in the "records" section near the bottom, but the infobox on the right has 309.6/1,016. So is it 306 m, 309 m, or 309.6 m?)

The boring investigation

The first thing to do2 is to look at Wikipedia's sources. It doesn't have one on the list of highest points, and it doesn't have one in the "records" section. The infobox does have a source for the height, which is on skyscraperpage.com. It lists the spire at 1,016 ft or 309.7 m, yet another number! There are various drawings, all giving the roof at 304.2 m and the spire at 309.7 m. (1,016 ft is 309.68 m, but 309.6 m is 1015.75 ft and 309.7 m is 1,016.08 ft. So if you convert 309.6 m to feet and back to meters, you could get 309.7 m. But wikipedia shouldn't be taking 309.6 m from that page.)

Skyscraperpage lists the source for the height as http://www.the-shard.com, and the about page on that site says: "How tall is The Shard? The Shard is 309.6 metres, or 1,016 feet, high and is Western Europe's tallest building." You'd certainly expect the Shard's official webpage to be right about this, but also it says "high" not "tall" so it could be a misdirect.

Next3, does Maher have any sources? For 306 m tallness he just says "most sources" give that figure. For 3 m above sea level, I think that comes from its height at the top. He quotes someone at Ordnance Survey saying the top of the Shard is 308.9 m above sea level, which gives around 3 m for the base.

Most of my research was just googling things. Search terms included "how tall is the shard", "height above sea level of the shard", "the shard architectural drawings", "uk contour lines" and "ctbuh the shard" (inspired by one of the earlier results). Here are some of the things I found.

The London Pass: "The Shard is 306 metres tall, however if you measure all the way up to the tip, it's 310 metres". I don't know what point below the tip it's talking about. It could be roof versus spire, but the skyscraperpage drawings give a different roof height.

The Skyscraper Center: height ("measured from the level of the lowest, significant, open-air, pedestrian entrance") is "306 m / 1,004 ft", both "to tip" and "architectural". (The difference being things like flagpoles and antennae, which the Shard doesn't have. The highest occupied floor is "244.3 m / 802 ft".) Seems like the kind of site that knows what it's talking about. Doesn't cite sources, but the drawing they have is labeled a CTBUH drawing, and that also sounds like the kind of organization that knows what it's talking about, giving me a new google search term.

SkyscraperCity: says both "309m" and "310m" with no apparent shame. But also, that link points to page 833 of 1385 of a discussion thread4, and at this partic...