Canary Wharf has always been an alien presence, and this can give some clue to its origins, growth and probable fall.
Canary Wharf rises abruptly out of the brick terraces, and recedes just as quickly back into them. It does not make any concession to the local vernacular, or to the supposed communities that surround it. Its style is High Globalist: sharp lines, veined marble, long escalators and chrome. It is the lost buccaneering Globalism of the airport lounge and of Simon Murray, still observable in places like Hong Kong and Singapore, but long since abolished here – first by New Labour, still more by Lockdown and, finally, by Net Zero. Canary Wharf’s original slate of office buildings are big rectangular hulkers. These buildings are maddeningly self-assured. We do not find in Canary Wharf, as we do in the City, attempts to stylistically apologise for itself as a centre of high finance. We find no ‘Cheese Graters’, ‘Walkie Talkies’ or big pickles – gimmicks proceeding from a spirit of post-1997 British twee. Canary Wharf has the courage to take itself seriously.
Canary Wharf was built for a specific and practical purpose, that is, to house the multinational banks whose old Victorian offices could not accommodate the computers and electrical wires of modern finance. This alone sets Canary Wharf apart from two other closely allied projects. The first is ‘regeneration’, where declining cities are held in place for sentimental reasons, with public sector boondoggles, universities of dubious quality and foreign students of dubious origin. The second is ‘gentrification’, a curious term, whereby white Britons are chided for moving back into areas in which they predominated less than 50 years ago. Canary Wharf remains the only true redevelopment that has ever occurred in London. It did not nibble around the edges of decay as the regenerators or gentrifiers have done. Canary Wharf annihilated. Specifically, it annihilated a row of declining warehouses, no trace of which now remains. What was created in its place is not, as is often alleged, soulless. Canary Wharf is a real place with a real purpose; it is a place to make money, and an arena for people’s ambitions. It thus has more of a claim to soul and ‘Community’ than whatever Salford Quays is.
Did Canary Wharf destroy the historical community of East London? Yes and no. Look at it this way: the wharfs of the old Docklands, long since derelict, were once the busiest in the world. They sat at the centre of a global network of commerce, loading and unloading goods from all seven continents. Which is more in keeping with this spirit – HSBC, or Luftur Rahman?
The purpose of Canary Wharf was to create a new financial centre in East London, which would then, in turn, spawn the houses, apartments, shops, theatres and schools to service a newly-prosperous East End. Canary Wharf was only ever meant to be the start, but it has been an overture with no first act. With Canary Wharf the history of East London reaches a turning point and fails to turn.
For this there are two reasons. The first is style. The initial towers of Canary Wharf have never been aesthetically answered. No other structure has picked up the gauntlet thrown down by One Canada Square, 8 Canada Square, One Churchill Place and Citigroup Centre. The original five were joined only by a handful of meagre pencil towers, and as a result the profile of Canary Wharf in 2023 is little different from that seen in the old Year 9 Geography textbook. Not a new style, then, but a flash in the pan.
The second reason is political. In 1998 the dictatorial Docklands Development Corporation, which had built Canary Wharf through executive fiat, was wound up. This left the fledgling commercial district at the mercy of the retrograde local councils that surround it. What followed was a successful rearguard action against the forces of modernisation. The district’s natural growth was successfully constricted, and has yet to fill out even the modest Isle of Dogs peninsula. The main instrument has been social housing, which makes up over a third of all stock in Tower Hamlets. This figure rises to 45-49% in Poplar, the district to Canary Wharf’s immediate north. This housing cannot be purchased or rented by the productive citizens who work in the offices of Canary Wharf. British social housing – we are reminded – makes no distinction between citizen and non-citizen, and is doled out by local government for political and ideological reasons. Much has been said of the trespasses of Canary Wharf on local communities. We invite local communities to explain their trespasses on Canary Wharf. The councils which dominate East London have chosen to house, not the young professionals of the Docklands, but enormous quantities of unemployed and unemployable migrants in what is some of the most valuable real estate in the world. These communities are not historical but artificial – far more artificial than Canary Wharf ever was. Unlike the Docklands they have no economic logic; absent these controls, the area would speedily transform into something like St John’s Wood.
Unable to grow, Canary Wharf has withered on the vine. It has not spread into a real neighbourhood, or a metropolis; it is a medium-sized office park. Without the ordinary trappings of middle-class life to sustain it, it is unsurprising that Canary Wharf is finding it harder and harder to compete with the City, and has indeed started to haemorrhage tenants.
The decline of Canary Wharf is a cultural event. In it, the East London of Dame Tessa Jowell Boulevard and the Olympics defeats the East London of economic modernity. Indeed, the Olympic redevelopment – Canary Wharf’s latter-day rival – has been the capstone of local government’s project of urban counterrevolution. In place of high finance, we will instead keep around the fossilised remains of a sporting event that ended eleven years ago. Defeated, too, is the social phenomenon of Canary Wharf. During its fairly brief life, the Docklands was an outlet for the talented to London’s east: that is, the products of lingering grammar schools in Kent and Essex. Essex-boy-done-good will disappear with Canary Wharf; he will not trouble London with his presence, and will leave it to Harriet Harman and her various clients. With no stage for his talents, he will stay in Essex and watch Celebrity Gogglebox instead.
Canary Wharf was – consciously or not – a rebuke to the Britain of 2023. It did not answer to the parochial tastes of its governing classes. It showed that so many imagined social questions were, in fact, so many Gordian knots to be cut. It was too dangerous to be kept alive.
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And….. If it ever came to electricity rationing? The smart meter adverts never seem to mention two salient facts:
1. High usage households (e.g. those using 10kwh per day to put 40 milesworth into their EV) can be identified.
2. It is technically possible to disable a domestic supply remotely via smart meter.
So regional blackouts can be replaced with selective supply disruption via a per-household usage cap. Still, ones EV might still fullfil a significant portion of its function by virtue signalling on your driveway.
Personally I think rationing unlikely. £1/kWh is going to result in a big switch-off. Government intervention in the form of price controlled excepted.
Smart Meters are all about surge pricing, think Economy 7 on steroids.
I don’t really get how surge pricing would “work” without smart appliances that automatically pause during a price surge (laundry, refrigeration, heat pumps). All surge pricing would otherwise accomplish is profit gouging. Look at what happened to Griddy in Texas.
As of 1Jul2022 all new car chargers must be “smart” so that’s one small step towards smart appliances. Only a few hundred million to go …..
And they will make it technically possible to charge extra tax for car charging, rather like excise duty on fuel pumps, with VAT on top.
I wouldn’t rush to use the term “profit gouging”.
If I have an open cycle gas turbine generator, or a grid scale battery, or a Dinorwig style hydro facility, I only make money when the grid is desperate for power, so most of the time my asset is sitting idle. These facilities would never be funded unless they could pay for themselves.
Part of the solution to high prices is levelling out demand and avoiding expensive peaks.
Ah but this article fails to factor in the smugness quotient, there are few things that can provide the level of smugness that is apparently derived from driving an electric car. In terms of smugness points per k/watt per mile, nothing can touch an electric car.
Not so smug when they are stuck on the hard shoulder waiting for the RAC
Exactly. When you run out of liquid fuel in your lovely fossil fuel vehicle, just get a bottle (preferably with a lid), and off you trot.
Go flat in a BEV, and a tow is your only option.
And even less smug if they’re stuck in the middle lane of a “SMART” motorway …… waiting to be demolished by an HGV.
Especially if the car has a green band on its number plate, allowing virtue signalling to a wider audience.
Love this comment.
I am even more smug than the average EV driver because I bought a Tesla two years ago with free supercharging for the lifetime of the car, so Elon is picking up the bill.
I apologise if that has raised anyone’s blood pressure to dangerous levels
I’m sorry but buying an electric car is a very dumb thing to do.
– They are more expensive
– They are actually not that cheap to run
– It takes ages to recharge vs a couple of.minutes for a normal car
– You can’t do long trips with them
An electric car has literally zero practical benefit vs a normal car. Not one.
Electric cars are for virtue signalling and for people who get a buzz from using the latest technology. That’s it.
They’re a massive con.
Please think about the environment before disrespecting EVs. They emit zero CO2, since all their electricity comes from renewables. I know this because my energy company says my lekkie is 100% renewables. Pretty much all energy companies claim 100% renewables.
Since only 43% of UK electricity is zero carbon (renewables and nuclear), it does make me wonder where the other 57% goes.
I also wonder if I plug in an EV, where the incremental load on the grid is met from? That would be gas then…. So that means an EV is a ‘displaced emission vehicle”, powered from a CCGT gas station running at about 50% efficiency. Since modern Atkinson cycle combustion engines are hitting mid-30s efficiency, the environmental benefit of an EV is, at best, marginal. Factor in the manufacturing CO2 overheads, and the energy involved lugging a 500kg battery around and ….
You were right all along…. They are a massive con..
..…. and the child/slave labour involved in mining the rare earth elements
They also refer to Elon Reeve Musk (government subsidy truffle hound par excellence) as “Elon Himself”.
They also write tweets addressed to their hero about their very heavy, very expensive and very badly put together electric sofas. The tweets generally start “Love my Tesla Elon but…” followed by a string of things wrong with their Teslas.
And the proper plural of Tesla is Teslae, don’t you know.
Elon thought he could skip PPAP.
And the only reason the other car manufacturers make BEVs is because greenwashing governments mandate it.
For limited company directors like me, I did the maths and I’m significantly better off with hiring a new EV for 3 years compared to maintaining my previous 10 year old diesel, or hiring a new petrol/diesel inside or outside of the business.
The tax breaks on the Benefit In Kind made it a total no brainer. Trust me, I did some detailed calculations accounting for taxes, maintenance, fuel, depreciation, etc, and EV came out way on top. This was when electricity was about 17p/kWh and diesel about £1.20/litre.
Yes, you need to plan long journeys a bit better, having an idea which service stations you might want to stop for a 20-minute meal at to get a 75% recharge, but I can live with that since I only need to drive that far that 3-4 times a year.
For solar panel owners like me, the increasing electricity prices won’t make much difference, and for the off-grid preppers, the latest cars and chargers, combined with solar panels, let you effectively run your house off-grid, discharging the battery while the rest of the street collapses into a blackout. If you have solar panels, I’d argue these cars make you less dependent, rather than more dependent, on the state.
The smoothness in the acceleration, compared to the jerking gears of a combustion engine, has impressed every passenger I’ve had.
Once the tax breaks are gone, perhaps a combustion vehicle will become more economically attractive again, but I will miss the convenience of not having to drive to, and queue at, petrol stations.
When the next poor sod delivering the 150th Amazon parcel of the day to your front door in his 10 year old diesel Toyota, having paid 20% VAT on his fuel. Having contributed to your feed in tariff for your solar panels (that he would have liked to have but couldn’t afford). Having paid his excise fuel duty, higher car tax, congestion charges etc, do remember to thank him for contributing to your gargantuan tax breaks you’re enjoying just because you could afford to spaff £70K on a new Polestar/Tesla, whatever. Will he think of you as a eco-warrior saving the planet for his kids or a benefit junkie screwing the working man?
I don’t make the rules, I just learn to operate within them for my own benefit. I don’t get the feed in tariff, but can understand why you would assume so.
£70k hasn’t been ‘spaffed’, the car has been hired. EV simply works out cheaper for me, and I imagine for quite a few other people too, so it’s disingenuous for anyone to say that EVs are a stupid choice. I’m not in this to save the planet, I’m in it to reduce my costs.
FYI my Amazon guy drives a 1 year old BMW.
I, for one, appreciate Caustic highlighting the economic benefits of hiring&driving an EV. Anyone annoyed should direct their grievances towards the government that concocted the “sloped playing field” rules that made this a sensible economic proposition.
I am not familiar with the tax breaks he referred to, but if they’re anywhere near as warped as my solar FIT payments of 60p/kWh then he might be enjoying considerable savings.
I agree. People cannot generate their own petrol at home!
The entire basis of shunning a source of energy which is 14 times more energy dense than electric batteries is, frankly, bonkers.
No it’s about creating a serf class whose movement you can control, which is perfectly if yr part of the predator class.
Now government has seized control of the energy grid through regulation only a fool would buy an electric car. Yr “friendly”
politician can turn yr movement on avd off at will.
If you have an EV as well as sufficient solar panels to provide for all your domestic electricity needs AND the ability/time to trickle-charge your car at home, it might just be worth it. I don’t have any of those things, so I won’t be wasting £25,000+ to get an inefficient, impractical EV ….. when I have a perfectly good 5 yr old, petrol driven Hyundai i10 (which is all I need).
The other aspect is the weight of Electric cars and the fact they do not require road tax. Heavier cars will wear out roads quicker as well as being more dangerous in collisions because of the greater mass.
‘There are no solutions, only trade-offs’ – T. Sowell
Excellent analysis, Nick.
It would be interesting to see these figures net of tax.
I reckon if you remove tax it’s already (ie before the price cap rises) at least twice as expensive to fuel an electric car than a petrol one.
However, if EVs take over the chancellor will need to tax them as heavily as petrol/diesel are taxed now. Oops!
Paul Bird
EV owners use an off peak tariff to charge at home, and most journeys are not long enough to require charging en-route.
But, yes, on the road charging will get more expensive, unless you’re one of those super smug b*stards like me that owns a Tesla with free supercharging for the lifetime of the car.
It’s not free – for the lifetime of your vehicle someone is paying.
No, someone is not paying, Tesla Inc are paying
I guess they did not imagine that electricity prices in Europe could ever go this high.
To update the sums a bit, today I paid 168.7p/l for petrol (21 p/l less than late June). That’s about 17.6 p/kWh thermal, based on 9.5 kWh per litre. Allowing for about 33% efficiency in my Toyota hybrid car (the theoretical peak efficiency is 38%), it’s about 53 p/kWh traction output – not a lot different from the projected day rate mains power charge.
Petrol/electric hybrids have many of the benefits of electric traction, but without the snags of pure battery electric ones, both financial and practical – unless you live in certain areas with special charge regimes.
If you deducted tax (VAT and fuel duty, plus all the congestion charges etc) from the comparison, using petrol or diesel over electricity would be a no brainer.