26th August: One Canada Square (Canary Wharf Tower)

One Canada Square (Canary Wharf) opened. His Royal Highness The Duke of Edinburgh officially opened One Canada Square on the morning of 26 August 1991.

1. Until 2010, when The Shard was built, this was the tallest building in the UK. The pyramid pinnacle is at 800 feet (240m) above sea level. It has 50 floors, 32 lifts, 3,960 windows and 4,388 internal steps. There are five Lightning conductor rods on the roof. The lobby is 36 feet (11m) high, clad in 90,000 square feet (8,000 m2) of marble from Italy, Guatemala and Turkey.
2. The designers wanted it to be even taller, with 55 floors, but they had to lose five floors because of height restrictions due to proximity to London City Airport.
3. The building was designed by architect Cesar Pelli, who based the design on World Financial Center and Elizabeth Tower (aka "Big Ben"). While Pelli himself spoke of the "spiritual power of the void" and called it "a portal to the sky ... a door to the infinite," not everyone shared his enthusiasm. Prince Charles said, "I personally would go mad if I had to work in a place like that" and Margaret Thatcher described it as "not quite stunning". Mrs Thatcher softened somewhat by the time of the topping out ceremony, at which she said it could become "national recognised landmark".
4. The pyramid on top of the building is 40 metres high and 30 metres square at the base. It is made from stainless steel and is held together by 100,000 nuts and bolts. It weighs over 100 tons. It was put in place by a crane in November 1990. The pyramid lights up in the evenings using 4000 energy efficient bulbs and can be seen from as far away as 20 miles (32 km). There are automatic window washing machines which can wash a window in under 3 seconds, but when the pyramid needs cleaning it requires special maintenance personnel to abseil from the light beacon opening at the top of the roof.
5. The light beacon on top is to identify the building to passing aircraft. Its intensity is much brighter than the required 2,000 candelas. It needs very little maintenance. At the ladder leading to it there is a sign which warns that unauthorised entry will lead to dismissal.
6. The tower consumes an average of 200,000 imperial gallons (910,000 L) of Water per day. Cleaning the Windows alone uses 426,000 gallons.
7. Talking of abseiling, there are, on occasion, specially organised abseiling events for charity when brave souls can abseil from the pyramid down to the ground. The first of these was on 21 July 2001, when a team of Royal Marines, and members of various companies including a team led by David Levy from HSBC, raised more than £45,000 for children's charities. The event earned a Guinness World Record. It's not for the faint hearted as it can get very windy up there and the building can sway 33.02 centimetres (13 inches) in the strongest winds.
8. The tower has only ever been completely evacuated once, on 30 October 2001, as a drill in response to the 11 September 2001 attacks. However, the tenants all knew it was going to happen so it may not have been a particularly useful exercise.
9. The IRA once made a rather inept attempt to blow up the tower in 1992. They worked out that to do the maximum damage, the bomb needed to be under the Docklands Light Railway Bridge, so they put their bomb in a van and drove it there. However, the van drew immediate police attention because they parked it on a double Yellow line. One of the terrorists pointed a gun at security guards, but the gun failed to go off, as did the bomb itself because the detonator failed.
10. The tower has appeared in a number f films and TV shows including 28 Weeks Later, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Mission: Impossible Ghost Protocol, The World Is Not Enough, The Bourne Supremacy, Johnny English, Doctor Who, The Tomorrow People, The Apprentice and EastEnders.