Shard Place marks the final chapter in Renzo Piano’s Shard Quarter – a 27-storey residential tower rising above London Bridge. We step inside the development to discover whether its design, amenities and panoramic skyline views set a new benchmark for rental living in the capital.
There was a time I walked through Shard Quarter every day. Off the train at London Bridge and down to an office in Borough.
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The three looming structures that occupy one of the smallest footprints just moments from the River Thames never cease to amaze me: how all-enveloping they feel, and how significant they are in what they structurally represent.
Some may say the towering 310-metre (1,016-foot) Shard tower is architect Renzo Piano’s magnum opus, but in truth it’s actually the three-building estate that completes the quarter – and with it, the Italian maestro’s vision for new-age vertical living in the British capital.
“I foresee the tower as a vertical city,” Piano mused back in the late noughties, as the project began to gather pace upwards from its foundations. “For thousands of people to work in and enjoy, and for millions to take to their heart.”
Central to his masterplan was Shard Place, a 27-storey glass tower that forms the residential component of the estate, anchoring how people live, work and play in one of London’s most inventive – and now desirable – districts.
The final piece of Renzo Piano’s Shard Quarter estate
Run by Real Estate Management UK (REM) and jointly owned by the State of Qatar and Sellar Property Group, Shard Place stands approximately 97 metres (318 feet) high and sits just to the estate’s left-hand side should you be viewing it from London Bridge.
From a compass point it’s the southern-most structure, nestled between the main tower and the 17-storey News Building, which occupy the flanks of the 16,000 square metre (3.7-acre) estate.
It is also the final piece of the Renzo Piano Building Workshop-conceived project.
Construction began in 2018 and finished after a seven-year period that teased what Piano and REM would ultimately deliver upon completion. It offers 176 apartments finished to a high specification, all exclusively offered as rentals.
Shard Place is the masterplan’s residential anchor, and it has just launched to the rental market. As the architect of The Shard itself, Piano’s involvement is not incidental — the building shares a formal vocabulary with its famous neighbour without ever feeling like a footnote to it.
Two intersecting volumes appear to float some 16 metres above the ground, suspended on a glazed base that gives the street-level experience a lightness that most towers deny.
We’ll go into this more as we progress through our tour. But how I begin is how I have a thousand times before: walking through, head craned up, taking it all in.
An all-rental tower in vibrant London Bridge
You enter the building directly next to the elevator that takes you down to the shopping arcade beneath the estate’s main visitor entrance.
I meet my guide, George Hankinson, for a tour through the building. As REM’s Head of Residential, Hankinson oversees – quite literally – all living operations within the Quarter, and specifically the day-to-day running of Shard Place.
As we head straight to the 27th floor, Hankinson gives me a whistle-stop tour of the building’s vitals: Shard Place comprises 176 units with 20 distinct layout configurations – up from 147 when the building was originally conceived as a sales project – ranging from studio apartments to three-bedroom units.
Prices begin at £700 per week for a studio, rising to £1,875 per week for a three-bedroom apartment – numbers that position Shard Place firmly within the upper tier of London’s rental market, though not beyond reason given what the building delivers.
This price tiering is playing into a wider shift in how luxury housing is delivered in London.
A decade ago, developments of this scale were built almost exclusively for sale – as was this Shard Place itself. But today, institutional landlords are increasingly treating high-end rental as a long-term asset class.
And in a global city like London, this could be considered a smart hedge given the luxury rental market’s robustness in the face of the downturn that gripped the market last year.
From Borough to Bermondsey: State of Craft's interiors
Interiors were designed by State of Craft (SoC), who have developed four distinct palettes across two collections.
The Bermondsey collection takes its name from the neighbourhood immediately south and offers both light and dark interpretations: the light variant runs off-white walls and limed oak furniture against a background of natural textures; the dark shifts the register toward taupe, tan leather and considered pops of green.
The Borough collection, named for the market quarter nearby, moves between natural oak with aubergine accents and a cooler scheme of black oak and gold against grey-blue tones.
It would be easy to dismiss named palettes as a marketing convention, but in practice the decision matters. London’s rental market has historically offered a binary between characterless new-build neutrality and the idiosyncrasies of whatever the last tenant left behind.
Furnishings include handmade pieces from SoC alongside classics from Børge Mogensen, B&B Italia and Fredericia. They’re not token gestures toward recognisable names either, but part of a coherent, considered programme by the London-based multidisciplinary design studio.
Similarly, the Richeldis Fine Art-curated 1,000-piece collection distributed through the building projects the feeling of a well-considered private collection rather than a corporate amenity.
Are these the best views in London?
What sets each apartment apart is its singularly unique aspect of central London’s skyline, enjoyed through floor-to-ceiling glazing and triple-aspect windows from all upper levels.
These orientations are as generous as they are gorgeous, and perhaps why they’re in with a shout for the best views in central London from a residential tower.
With the Thames in the foreground, from one aspect you see St Paul’s and Westminster receding into a Lowry-esque middle distance, while the London Eye is visible on clear days to the west.
The Tate and One Blackfriars can be glimpsed from the building’s south-westerly flank, while to the north and east the entire City of London, Tower Bridge and Canary Wharf stretch into the horizon.
Say it out loud and it’s easy to make the case; stand inside an apartment with all of the above at your feet and it’s almost impossible to argue otherwise.
Why communal space works differently
The building offers 12,000 square feet of amenity space across three levels, and the decision about where to place it turns out to be more consequential than it sounds.
Most comparable developments concentrate their amenities in the basement – a practical choice that treats the gym, cinema and lounges as functional boxes stacked below the revenue-generating floors.
The gym, complete with a private studio, sauna and steam room, sits with views over the King’s College London quad. It is the kind of light that changes how you feel about a treadmill at 7am.
At the top – the 27th floor – sits what is billed as London’s highest outdoor swimming pool, accompanied by a landscaped sun deck with views in every direction.
On a clear winter morning, with the river below and the city spread outward, the pool deck has a particular quality of silence that the streets 27 floors down cannot offer.
Elsewhere in the amenity stack: a double-height orangery; a library with a south-facing terrace and sightlines to St Paul’s; a private dining room with a full kitchen; and a 15-seat cinema.
Hankinson explains how the approach is different: these spaces have been designed as a crucible where community can take seed, but his staff will not actively force its germination through tenant gatherings, socials or themed events.
Instead, residents can use these spaces as they see fit, enjoy them with friends and relatives from outside the building, and repurpose rooms to suit a variety of needs.
The Quarter, and what surrounds it
Part of what Shard Place sells is proximity – not just to The Shard itself, but to everything the London Bridge neighbourhood has accrued over the past decade.
Borough Market is a two-minute walk. Tate Modern is a short riverside stroll west. White Cube, the Hayward Gallery and the Bermondsey antiques strip are all within reasonable reach.
London Bridge station – with direct connections to the City, Canary Wharf, Gatwick, St Pancras, the whole of south London and the Home Counties beyond – sits at the building’s feet.
The neighbourhood has long been one of London’s most functionally well-connected, and the cultural infrastructure has caught up.
It’s why in little over six months the building has outperformed market expectations, Hankinson explains, adding that the area is one of few in London that can offer that genuine alchemy of lifestyle, accessibility and relative affordability outside PCL’s prohibitive confines.
An estate of many aspects
Since launching in June 2025, Hankinson says his team has welcomed a diverse mix of residents.
In many ways they’re the usual suspects for a luxury development of this ilk: corporate relocators looking for a counterpoint to Canary Wharf; international students attending nearby universities; or young professionals who simply wish to stroll over London Bridge and into the City for work.
But as you pass them by, they’re not the kind of AI-generated brochure figurines simulated to sell a “diverse audience”, but people with genuine quirks and backstories.
One tenant, for instance, as Hankinson points out, turned up with a single cardboard box, while the next arrived with an entire removal-van load, destined for an already furnished apartment.
Residents interact as you’d naturally expect, but the community events or socials hosted by the client services team have a more personal feel, and are weighted on balance towards more collective interests and tastes. Again, this is very allowing the concept of neighbourhood to form naturally.
There is a version of this development that could have been purely transactional – a high-end rental scheme extracting premium rents from a premium postcode, with amenities serving as marketing copy.
But it’s this humanising aspect that makes you feel Hankinson’s – and by extension REM’s – intention to allow life in this vertical city to flourish organically.
Evaluating Piano’s masterpiece 20 years in the making
Before I leave, I speak to Hankinson about the building’s relationship to The Shard, and why it’s worth examining on its own terms.
Yes, residents have all the benefits of living in such close proximity to one of London’s most iconic landmarks, but the geometry of the site means that particular perspective belongs to people further away – or passing through – just like me.
For them, they’re part of something different: the first who get to enjoy Piano’s completed vision, and proof that Shard Quarter is living up to the sky-high expectations the designer set for his project more than 20 years ago.
For more information visit Shard Place’s official website.
