High hopes for protest dashed

 
The owner of the Shard is facing a legal battle
14 April 2014

A front-page campaign by some of London’s leading cultural figures has hit a stumbling block — the British public. A fortnight after the likes of playwright Alan Bennett and sculptor Antony Gormley joined the Observer in decrying the development of the city’s skyline, a YouGov poll shows that just 15 per cent of Londoners think the Shard has blighted the landscape, with 57 per cent championing it. Even fewer disapprove of the Gherkin.

“It is shocking that such a profound change is being made to a great city with so little public awareness or debate,” Rowan Moore, the Observer’s architecture critic, had previously declaimed. He may be less keen to ask them after seeing these results.

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