HSBC’s departure spells doom for Canary Wharf’s isolated use

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The writer is FT’s architecture critic

The Isle of Dogs was never an island but a peninsula, although it often feels like one. The separation of the Ports of London, with warehouses and wharves full of valuable goods, was fitting as a separate city. A place with its own culture. Transformed from the 1980s into a steely, shiny island of impenetrable global finance, it still feels aloof, prosperous but precarious.

HSBC’s decision to vacate its 8 Canada Square building – dubbed The Tower of Doom – for an office in the city is a blow to Canary Wharf. The upstart cluster with a Manhattan-style skyline designed to replace the flagging, pinstriped, class-bound Square Mile is now struggling itself.

Canary Wharf was the result of a mix of Thatcherite politics, Big Bang regulation and Michael Heseltine’s experiment with the London Docklands Development Corporation – a turbocharged privatization and lightly regulated and untaxed development of public land. Canadian developers Olympia and York were attracted by Thatcher, who were planning to do to the Docklands what they had done to downtown New York with the World Financial Centre.

But the WFC was only a few minutes’ walk from Wall Street. Canary Wharf has always lived in itself – it even seems to have its own microclimate with hostile wind tunnels built between skyscrapers. There was actually a lot around; The Isle of Dogs has one of the highest densities of council housing anywhere in England. But in the anti-social-housing Thatcher era, these were the wrong kind of neighbours. Instead of forming a piece of a connected, contiguous city, Canary Wharf became a trenched, gated, privatized place, a symbol of division.

It worked for some time. Banks were lured into new high-rise buildings. Olympia and York imported their favorite architect, Cesare Pelli (designer of the towers at NYC’s WFC), for the centerpiece One Canada Square with its distinctive pyramidal crown. SOM, the Chicago Modernists masterplanned and built in a North American-style grid. Norman Foster, who designed HSBC’s incredible Hong Kong headquarters, which at the time was the most expensive building in the world, went to work on his London Tower, a sleek extrusion. He then built the magnificent Jubilee Line Canary Wharf station, a perfect symbol of arrival, though now often looking uncomfortably empty.

The group of towers, now so prominent on the skyline, forced the city to change; The reinvention was initiated by Foster’s Gherkin, which now joins the group of tall, stout towers. The precariousness of Canary Wharf was underlined by the bankruptcy of Olympia and York in 1992, the banking crisis of 2008, and then the pandemic. The new development is virtually all residential, some very nice, such as Herzog & de Meuron’s Forest Park Drive, But most of it is normal. Yet the region still somehow feels mono-cultural.

As the city re-equipped itself with high-class office space until the 2010s, workers returned to their pubs and alleys, pocket parks, bars and casual lunch spots. The regeneration of Shoreditch was an attraction while the Heggies “went west” to Mayfair for its proximity to customers and restaurants.

Canary Wharf is famous for its connectivity – first the Docklands Light Railway, then the Jubilee, then the Elizabeth Line, the £18.9 billion cost of which was said to be the result of lobbying by bankers who wanted a better Heathrow link. However, its problem lies in this very idea: it is defined by how easy it is to get in and out again. It was never really part of London, it was known as Downtown Manhattan, but more and more it resembled the original Toronto of La Défense or Olympia and York.

Its future is uncertain. The floor plates of those bank towers are too deep to be converted into residential and remain isolated. Canary Wharf was a fascinating experiment. Now it needs to somehow become a part of its host city.