Why you should experience Shangri-La The Shard in London, England.
Shangri-La The Shard is a renowned luxury hotel where London Bridge's mercantile history, contemporary architectural ambition, Asian hospitality culture and metropolitan performance converge across the upper reaches of Renzo Piano's glass tower.
Set along St. Thomas Street near Joiner Street and just steps from London Bridge Station, the hotel occupies levels 34 through 52 of The Shard, the 309.6-meter tower conceived by developer Irvine Sellar with Renzo Piano Building Workshop and completed in 2012 as the defining structure of the wider Shard Quarter. Piano developed the tower as a vertical city composed of eight angled glass façades, or shards, whose irregular termination leaves the summit visually open while offices, restaurants, residences, hospitality and public viewing spaces rise through distinct vertical zones. Shangri-La became the tower's principal hospitality component when the Hong Kong-based group opened its first United Kingdom property there on May 6, 2014, completing the public-facing program of the building. The result is a hotel where Irvine Sellar, Renzo Piano Building Workshop and Shangri-La connect London Bridge's historic role as a point of arrival with a twenty-first-century expression of architecture, international hospitality and vertical urbanism.
What you should know about Shangri-La The Shard.
Shangri-La The Shard is best known for opening on May 6, 2014 as Shangri-La Hotels and Resorts' first property in the United Kingdom, third in Europe after Paris in 2010 and Istanbul in 2013, and London's first high-rise hotel, occupying levels 34 through 52 of The Shard with 202 guestrooms and suites distributed from levels 36 through 50. The opening collection ranged from 30 to 188 square meters, with the tower's tapering geometry producing individually configured accommodations, while three signature suites occupied the upper room levels and Ren, Yi and Li established three river-facing event spaces on level 34 with respective capacities of 140, 10 and 35 guests. LRF Designers, founded by Paul Leese and Charles Robertson, worked across levels 34 through 50 including the Sky Lobby and TΔͺNG, while Steve Leung contributed to the interiors and FM Architettura d'Interni designed the bedroom suites. AndrΓ© Fu and his Hong Kong studio AFSO authored GΕNG on level 52 around the Chinese dougong system of interlocking timber brackets, placing one of Asia's most internationally recognized designers at the architectural summit of the hotel. Forbes Travel Guide awarded Shangri-La The Shard Five Stars in 2024, 2025 and 2026, the MICHELIN Guide awarded One MICHELIN Key in 2024 and 2025, and Travel + Leisure ranked it the number one hotel in London and number nine in Europe in 2025.
Executive Chef Paolo Belloni develops the hotel's contemporary culinary authorship through TΔͺNG on level 35, combining seasonal British produce with Asian culinary influences in a dining room positioned within LRF Designers' original interior program. AndrΓ© Fu's GΕNG provides a separate expression of Asian design on level 52, where the dougong concept informed a composition divided between the Cocktail Bar, Champagne Bar and Sky Pool, making the venue the highest hotel bar in Western Europe. GΕNG's current Nature & Earth program extends that cultural style into cocktails organized around ingredients including buckwheat, Japanese whisky, shochu, jasmine, mezcal and Asian spices, translating botanical and culinary references into the hotel's drinks culture. Together, Paolo Belloni, LRF Designers, AndrΓ© Fu and AFSO sustain an authored hospitality character in which Asian culinary technique and design language operate within Renzo Piano's London architecture.
How to fold Shangri-La The Shard into your trip.
Shangri-La The Shard works as the anchor for an afternoon tracing medieval commerce, Shakespearean performance and modern British art along the South Bank.
Begin at Borough Market, where a trading tradition reaching back a millennium developed beside the southern approach to London Bridge, eventually concentrating specialist food merchants beneath the railway infrastructure of Southwark. Continue to Shakespeare's Globe, where Sam Wanamaker's decades-long campaign to restore a permanent Shakespearean theater to Bankside culminated in the reconstructed Globe opening in 1997 near the site of the playhouse built by the Lord Chamberlain's Men in 1599. Conclude at Tate Modern, where Herzog & de Meuron transformed Sir Giles Gilbert Scott's former Bankside Power Station into a museum of international modern and contemporary art that opened in 2000, later extending the complex through the architects' Switch House. The progression moves from Southwark's medieval trading culture through Shakespeare and Wanamaker's theatrical inheritance into Scott, Herzog & de Meuron and the international art collections of Tate Modern, revealing the centuries of commerce, performance and creative ambition beneath Shangri-La The Shard.
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