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The author is the FT’s structure critic
The Isle of Dogs was by no means an island however a peninsula, although it has usually felt like one. It suited London’s docks to be separate, an isolated metropolis of warehouses and wharves full of invaluable cargo. A spot with a tradition of its personal. Transformed because the Nineteen Eighties right into a steely, glittering island of impenetrable international finance, it nonetheless feels aside, wealthy however precarious.
HSBC’s resolution to vacate their 8 Canada Square Building — dubbed The Tower of Doom — for an workplace within the City is a shock to Canary Wharf. The upstart cluster with a Manhattan-style skyline, designed to supplant a flagging, pinstriped, class-bound Square Mile, is itself now struggling.
Canary Wharf was the outcome of a mix of Thatcherite politics, Big Bang deregulation and Michael Heseltine’s experiment with the London Docklands Development Corporation — a turbocharged privatisation and flippantly regulated and untaxed improvement of public land. Canadian Developers Olympia & York have been wooed by Thatcher, planning on doing for Docklands what that they had accomplished for downtown New York with the World Financial Center.
But the WFC was just a few minutes stroll from Wall Street. Canary Wharf was at all times out by itself — it even appears to have its personal microclimate with hostile wind tunnels created between the skyscrapers. In reality there was loads close by; the Isle of Dogs one of the best densities of council housing anyplace in England. But within the anti-social-housing Thatcher period, these have been the improper form of neighbours. Rather than construct a bit of related, contiguous metropolis, Canary Wharf grew to become a moated, gated, privatised place, an emblem of division.
For some time it labored. The banks have been seduced into new high-rise buildings. Olympia & York imported their favoured architects, César Pelli (designers of the towers within the NYC’s WFC) for the centrepiece One Canada Square with its distinctive pyramidal crown. SOM, the Chicago Modernists, masterplanned and in-built a North American-style grid. Norman Foster, who had designed HSBC’s unimaginable Hong Kong HQ, on the time the costliest constructing on the planet, went to work on their London tower, a modern extrusion. He then constructed the magnificent Jubilee Line Canary Wharf station, an ideal image of arrival, although now usually wanting uneasily empty.
The cluster of towers, now so outstanding on the skyline, pressured the City to rework; the reinvention was kick-started by Foster’s Gherkin, now subsumed by a huddle of taller, fatter towers. The precarity of Canary Wharf was underlined by Olympia & York’s chapter in 1992, by the banking disaster of 2008 after which once more by the pandemic. New improvement is just about all residential, some superb, like Herzog & de Meuron’s One Park Drive, however most of it generic. Yet the world nonetheless by some means feels monocultural.
By the 2010s when the City correct had resupplied itself with high-grade workplace area, employees have been drawn again to its pubs and alleys, pocket parks, bars and convivial lunch spots. The reinvention of Shoreditch was a lure whereas the hedgies went “up west” to Mayfair for proximity to shoppers and eating places.
Canary Wharf is famed for its connectivity — first the Docklands Light Railway, then the Jubilee, then the Elizabeth Line, the £18.9bn price of which was stated to be the product of lobbying by bankers who needed higher Heathrow hyperlinks. Its drawback, nonetheless, is inherent in that very concept: it’s outlined by how straightforward it’s to get out and in once more. It was by no means really half of London, billed as downtown Manhattan however extra like La Défense or Olympia & York’s native Toronto, at greatest.
Its future is unsure. The ground plates of these financial institution towers are too deep for conversion to residential and it stays isolated. Canary Wharf was an enchanting experiment. Now it must turn into, by some means, a component of its host metropolis.
