All good suggestions! But I’m probably not interested enough to, like, leave my flat and talk to people to investigate :p
(I actually did ask a friend who works there if there were any plaques or anything. He said he’d look next time he was in the office, but I think he probably forgot.)
I hadn’t realized there was an open-air viewing platform, I thought the highest the public could go was a few floors below the roof. Still, it looks to me like there’s a lot more than 4 m from there to the tip.
If you’re on the open-air viewing platform, it might be feasible to use something like a sextant or shadow lengths to figure out the height from the platform to the top, and then use a different tool to figure out the height of the platform.
From the photo of the tower’s shadow in this article, I have two further guesses about the relative heights of the viewing platform and the pointy bits:
At some time in the year, the building’s shadow will probably show the viewing deck height and pointy bit height, so they could in theory be triangulated
Due to the surrounding urban development, it looks wildly unlikely that the shadow will hit any surface it’s actually useful to measure it on.
It might not be legal to use from the viewing platform to the pointy bits, and it might not work in broad daylight, but a laser distance meter with ~50m range can be had for around $20 at the low end and fits in a pocket ;)
A sextant is much less likely to cause problems by interfering with other tech, though.
Ah. Perhaps you could wait till someone from out of town is visiting, and use them as an excuse to go up to the platform… that’s how I usually make it to local tourist spots =)
All good suggestions! But I’m probably not interested enough to, like, leave my flat and talk to people to investigate :p
(I actually did ask a friend who works there if there were any plaques or anything. He said he’d look next time he was in the office, but I think he probably forgot.)
I hadn’t realized there was an open-air viewing platform, I thought the highest the public could go was a few floors below the roof. Still, it looks to me like there’s a lot more than 4 m from there to the tip.
If you’re on the open-air viewing platform, it might be feasible to use something like a sextant or shadow lengths to figure out the height from the platform to the top, and then use a different tool to figure out the height of the platform.
From the photo of the tower’s shadow in this article, I have two further guesses about the relative heights of the viewing platform and the pointy bits:
At some time in the year, the building’s shadow will probably show the viewing deck height and pointy bit height, so they could in theory be triangulated
Due to the surrounding urban development, it looks wildly unlikely that the shadow will hit any surface it’s actually useful to measure it on.
It might not be legal to use from the viewing platform to the pointy bits, and it might not work in broad daylight, but a laser distance meter with ~50m range can be had for around $20 at the low end and fits in a pocket ;)
A sextant is much less likely to cause problems by interfering with other tech, though.
They will in fact stop you from taking fancy laser measuring kit to the top of the Shard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckcdqlo3pYc&t=792s.
Ah. Perhaps you could wait till someone from out of town is visiting, and use them as an excuse to go up to the platform… that’s how I usually make it to local tourist spots =)