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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