Chapter Ten
Canary Wharf
The Fruit Shed That Became a Skyline
Why is Canary Wharf called Canary Wharf?
In brief: Canary Wharf began as the practical name of a West India Docks warehouse handling produce from the Canary Islands. The dockside name survived redevelopment and was adopted by the modern transport interchange.
Transport context: London Underground, DLR and Elizabeth line interchange.
In 1936, a warehouse is built at the West India Docks for things that bruise.
Bananas arrive green. Oranges come in wooden crates. Vegetables have crossed from islands off the coast of Africa and must be unloaded, counted, moved and sold before time begins its work upon them. A cargo of rum may improve while it waits. Fruit does not possess this patience.
The new warehouse is given a practical name. It handles produce from the Canary Islands, so it becomes Canary Wharf.1
Nobody looks at it and sees a financial district.
There are no towers in the name, no banks, no railway station of polished metal and concrete. There is only a shed beside dock water and a clerk’s need to distinguish one place of business from another. The name is not intended to outlive the work.
This is often how London prepares its monuments. Without ceremony.
To understand what the warehouse inherits, we must leave 1936 and walk backwards through its doors.
In 1802, the West India Docks open on the Isle of Dogs. They are London’s first great enclosed docks: nearly a kilometre of controlled water, with space for hundreds of vessels, ranks of warehouses and entrances guarded against the theft that flourishes along the crowded river.2
Before them, ships arriving in London wait in the Pool of London between London Bridge and Wapping. Masts stand so close that the river resembles a winter wood. Cargo spoils while captains wait for a berth. Goods disappear between ship and shore. Merchants complain that the greatest port in the world conducts its business through congestion, leakage and chance.
The merchants of the West India trade propose a more obedient river.
Parliament gives them one. An Act authorises the docks and grants their ships a twenty-one-year monopoly. Vessels carrying West Indian cargo must use the new establishment. The dock is to be water engineered into commerce: ships enter, goods are secured, duties are collected and profit moves through gates that can be watched.2
The place is built like a fortress.
High walls close it from the surrounding district. Spikes discourage climbing. A moat and private police protect what lies within. Warehouses rise along the quay, long enough to make palaces appear domestic. Inside are timber floors, iron supports, hoists, vaults and doors opening towards the dock. The architecture is plain because the contents supply the grandeur.
Sugar. Rum. Coffee. Timber. Pimento. Mahogany.
The cargo is counted in barrels, sacks and tons.
The lives behind it are not counted there.
The West India Docks are created by merchants whose wealth depends upon Caribbean plantations and the labour of enslaved Africans. Robert Milligan and George Hibbert, leading promoters of the scheme, possess direct interests in this economy. The warehouses are not later buildings that happen to acquire an association with slavery. They are designed expressly to receive its products.3
On a dock ledger, sugar has weight, quality, origin and value. The hand that cut the cane is absent.
This absence is useful. It allows Londoners to encounter sweetness without the field, rum without the plantation, mahogany without the violence that makes it available. By the time the goods reach the warehouse they appear to be objects of trade rather than the result of coercion. The dock performs a moral transformation before any refinery begins.
It makes suffering look like stock.
The new works are celebrated as an achievement of engineering and commercial power. They are both. A fact does not cease to be impressive because another fact makes it shameful. The docks solve a real problem of shipping. They also increase the efficiency with which the proceeds of slavery enter London.
The city’s wealth has often required these two sentences to stand together.
The labour on the London quay is free, but it is not gentle.
The Alley Named by Pain
A sack of raw sugar does not resemble a weapon.
It is cloth, rope and cargo. It has passed from cane field to mill, from hold to quay, acquiring weight and value at each stage. By the time a dock worker shoulders it in London, the violence that produced much of the trade has been converted into paperwork.
The sack has its own violence left.
Raw sugar absorbs moisture. The crystals leak through seams and grind against skin. Men carrying the loads suffer cracks and cuts across hands, necks and heads. The work is repeated hour after hour, ship after ship. Sacks are opened for sampling, retied and hung out to dry between the warehouses.4
The passage acquires a name.
Blood Alley.
Not because one famous murder occurred there. Not because a single accident shocked the port. The name records accumulation: small wounds made ordinary by repetition. Merchant ledgers measure tons and prices. The alley keeps another account, written on bodies.
There is no known ceremony at which the name is bestowed. Working names seldom receive one. They emerge because a phrase is useful and everyone understands it. Meet in Blood Alley. Take those sacks through Blood Alley. The directions preserve what official descriptions of efficient commerce prefer not to see.
Above, merchants inspect samples. Below, rum lies in vaults. Between them, men climb through dust, rope and shouted instruction while the world arrives on their shoulders.
Ships bring the world to London, but the world arrives heavy.
In 1807, Britain abolishes its trade in enslaved people. In 1833, Parliament abolishes slavery across most of the British Empire, with compensation paid to enslavers rather than to those they have enslaved. The legal structure changes. The warehouses continue working.
Sugar still arrives. Coffee comes from Cuba and Brazil, where slavery survives for decades longer. The docks expand beyond their original Caribbean purpose and become part of a wider imperial network. A law can end a legal status before it ends a supply chain.5
By the twentieth century, West India Docks handles cargo from many parts of the world. The old name remains, though the trade has widened. London is expert at keeping a geographical term after the geography within it has altered.
Then comes the fruit warehouse.
In 1936, produce from the Canary Islands receives its own building and the modest name Canary Wharf. The words belong to the working port. Canary identifies a route of trade. Wharf identifies the edge at which water and land exchange their burdens.
The name is exact.
Its future will be extravagant.
War arrives first.
The docks are essential to a city that must be supplied and therefore obvious targets for German bombers. Fires spread through warehouses. Cranes, sheds and quays are hit. Of the great original range on North Quay, only two warehouses survive. The district that has stored the material wealth of empire becomes a landscape of flame, broken brick and exposed timber.6
After 1945, the port rebuilds. Within ten years the docks are working again, and by the 1960s they are busier than ever. The recovery looks like permanence. Ships continue to arrive. Men continue to unload them. The water, walls and warehouses appear to have survived their greatest danger.
They have not.
The threat is not a bomb but a box.
Containerisation changes the shape of trade. Cargo that once travelled as separate barrels, crates and sacks can be packed into standard steel containers, transferred rapidly between ship, railway and lorry. The new vessels grow larger. They need deeper water, broader manoeuvring space and quays designed for cranes of a different order.
London’s enclosed docks were built to discipline eighteenth-century shipping. Their very design now prevents adaptation.
The river journey to the Isle of Dogs is too long for the largest ships. The locks are too small. Warehouses made for men handling individual goods are poorly suited to sealed containers that should not be opened at all. Trade moves east to Tilbury, where deep water and open space offer the future fewer obstacles.7
The docks are defeated by the efficiency they once represented.
West India Docks closes in 1980.
The disappearance of work is faster than the disappearance of its structures. Water remains. Quay walls remain. Empty sheds, redundant cranes and roads built for lorries remain. Around them are communities whose employment, shops and family histories have been tied to the port. Thousands of jobs across Docklands have gone.
An abandoned dock is not empty.
It is full of people who have been told that the reason for their district has moved elsewhere.
In 1981, Margaret Thatcher’s government creates the London Docklands Development Corporation. The LDDC receives extensive powers to acquire land, grant planning permission and prepare the former docks for investment. Part of the Isle of Dogs becomes an Enterprise Zone, offering advantages intended to draw private developers east.8
The language changes before the landscape does.
The docks are no longer declining industry. They are opportunity sites. Dereliction becomes development land. The old port is spoken of as a blank space, which is convenient for anyone wishing to build and alarming to anyone already living there.
A blank space has no claims upon it.
Docklands does.
Local residents ask what regeneration is intended to regenerate. They need housing, employment, schools, shops and reliable transport. Office developers need large sites, permissive planning and routes by which workers can arrive from elsewhere. These needs overlap, but they are not identical. Opposition grows around the shortage of affordable housing and the fear that the benefits of redevelopment will pass above the existing communities like an elevated railway.8
The railway is not a metaphor. It is being built.
The Docklands Light Railway is conceived as part of the regeneration itself: a relatively inexpensive automated line using sections of redundant railway corridor. Queen Elizabeth II formally opens it in July 1987; passengers follow in August. Small driverless trains run between Tower Gateway, Stratford and Island Gardens, carrying travellers through a landscape in which the promised city is still largely drawn on plans.9
A passenger can sit at the front and look directly along the track.
The future, for once, has no driver blocking the view.
In the same year, the LDDC signs its master agreement with the Canadian developer Olympia & York for a vast office development at the West India Docks. The old fruit-handling name is promoted from warehouse to district.
Canary Wharf will now mean towers, squares, roads and millions of square feet of offices.10
The choice preserves the dock while concealing much of its cargo. Wharf supplies authenticity. Canary supplies distance and light. The name sounds maritime without sounding industrial, historical without declaring which history.
It travels well.
Construction begins in earnest in 1988. Foundations descend where ships once floated. Streets are laid across quays. The central tower, One Canada Square, rises to a stainless-steel pyramid and reorganises London’s eastern skyline. For generations, the vertical signs of London have been church spires, the dome of St Paul’s, factory chimneys and the towers of Westminster. Now finance acquires its own steeple.
The DLR station called Canary Wharf does not open until November 1991. By then the district around it has become large enough to require the name on a platform.11
The timing is unfortunate.
The first offices are completed as the property market falls. Tenants are fewer than the calculations require. The transport promised for the development is incomplete, and the DLR alone cannot carry the city of workers imagined in the plans. In 1992, Olympia & York collapses into bankruptcy and Canary Wharf is placed in administration.12
The tower stands.
The city beneath it hesitates.
There is something unnerving about a new financial district without enough finance to sustain it. Lights occupy only portions of the façades. Plazas wait for crowds. The architecture is finished enough to be visible and unfinished enough to seem accusatory.
Canary Wharf has become a monument to confidence at precisely the moment confidence withdraws.
Its survival depends partly upon a railway far larger than the one already there.
Plans to extend the Jubilee line eastwards have existed in several forms. The version that finally proceeds will leave Green Park, pass through Westminster, Waterloo, London Bridge and the former docks, cross the Thames repeatedly and continue towards Stratford. The developers are required to contribute substantially to the transport infrastructure on which their offices depend.13
At Canary Wharf, engineers drain part of the former West India Dock and excavate an immense station box. The building is roughly three hundred metres long. Sir Norman Foster’s design places most of this volume out of sight, beneath a landscaped park. At street level, curved glass canopies rise like bubbles breaking the surface. Daylight falls through them towards escalators and the great concourse below.14
The railway has not merely entered the dock.
It has occupied the absence left by the ships.
Inside, the station is frequently compared to a cathedral. The comparison is inevitable and not entirely flattering to cathedrals, which usually provide somewhere to sit. Yet the scale is ecclesiastical. Concrete columns rise through a space designed for processions. Escalators carry worshippers of punctuality between levels. Polished metal reflects artificial light. The altar is a departure board and the congregation does not intend to know one another.14
The grandeur has a practical cause. Tens of thousands of passengers must pass without crushing into narrow passages. The station is designed for the district Canary Wharf hopes to become, not merely the one standing above it when construction begins.
On 17 September 1999, Canary Wharf Underground station opens on the Jubilee line.15
The effect is more than convenience. A place that has seemed remote from central London is drawn into its daily rhythm. The journey from Westminster takes minutes. Workers can emerge directly beneath the towers. The large offices that once appeared stranded now possess the crowds for which their lobbies were designed.
The railway does what railways have done elsewhere in this book.
It makes a name inevitable.
For the first time, millions of passengers who have never seen a fruit warehouse begin to say Canary Wharf because it is printed on a map. The name is detached from its origin and attached to a destination. A practical label becomes metropolitan geography.
Then London builds another railway through it.
Work on the Canary Wharf station for Crossrail begins in 2009, this time within the North Dock. Nearly one hundred million litres of water are pumped from the station box. Fish are moved. Hundreds of thousands of tonnes of material are excavated. From beneath the dock bed comes a fragment of amber estimated to be about fifty-five million years old and part of a woolly mammoth’s jaw.16
The financial district has always presented itself as new.
The mammoth offers a correction.
Above the station rises Crossrail Place, a long structure with shops, restaurants and a public roof garden beneath a timber lattice. Below it, platforms await trains that will connect the district directly with the West End and Heathrow. The Elizabeth line opens through Canary Wharf on 24 May 2022.17
The name now belongs to three railway stations on three systems.
The DLR station is elevated among the buildings. The Jubilee line station lies beneath a park in a former dock. The Elizabeth line station occupies another dock farther north, with a garden above it. They do not form one simple interior. The passenger changes by walking through the district the railways helped to create.
Water, train, garden.
London stacks its replacements rather than choosing between them.
Leave the Jubilee line by one of Foster’s glass canopies.
The first surprise is how little of the station can be seen. The space below is enormous; the entrance above seems almost modest. Around it, towers rise close enough to edit the sky. Office workers move quickly across the paving. Visitors pause to decide whether the map in their hand agrees with the geometry before them.
Walk north-west towards West India Quay.
The glass gives way to brick. Number One Warehouse, built at the beginning of the nineteenth century, is one of the two survivors of the original North Quay range and now houses London Museum Docklands. Its loading doors face the water. The building still possesses the mass required to hold sugar, rum and coffee in quantities that made fortunes.18
Go inside.
The museum does not allow the old docks to remain a decorative background for the towers. It follows the port through trade, labour, empire, war and decline. Its galleries address London’s involvement in slavery in the very warehouse built to receive plantation goods. The location supplies an argument no display case could improve.19
Then return along the water towards Crossrail Place.
A roof garden grows above the newest railway. Far below it, trains pass through a station excavated from a dock bed. Farther below, the ground has surrendered amber and mammoth bone. Across the water, offices conduct transactions more quickly than any ship could have carried news of them.
The district appears to have replaced the docks completely.
Look again.
The basins still determine where buildings may stand. Quay walls hold the water. Surviving warehouses mark the line of the old port. The railway stations themselves are shaped by the docks: one built in a drained basin, another sunk into the North Dock. The new city has not erased the old engineering. It has inhabited it.
Listen when the name is announced.
Canary Wharf.
It does not begin with a skyscraper.
It begins with perishable cargo and a warehouse built in 1936. Behind that warehouse lie docks constructed for sugar, rum and coffee; fortunes made from slavery; labour that cut men’s skin deeply enough to name an alley; war damage; post-war recovery; container ships too large for the locks; closure; unemployment; political experiment; local protest; a Canadian developer’s wager; a tower completed before its future was secure; and two generations of railways sunk into water made dry.
The fruit shed disappeared.
Its name expanded until it covered a city.
The ships left.
The trains kept saying it.
Notes and Sources
London Museum, “West India Docks”. The museum records that a warehouse was built in 1936 to handle fruit and vegetables from the Canary Islands and that this was the original Canary Wharf.↩
London Museum, “West India Docks”, and Historic England, “Warehouses and General Offices at Western End of North Quay”, National Heritage List entry 1242440. The West India Docks opened in 1802 as London’s first enclosed commercial dock. They were almost a kilometre long, could accommodate hundreds of vessels, were protected by walls, a moat and their own police, and initially held a twenty-one-year monopoly over the West India trade.↩ ↩
Historic England, “Warehouses and General Offices at Western End of North Quay”, and “London: Centre of the Transatlantic Slave Trade”. The surviving warehouses were built expressly to receive goods produced by enslaved people on Caribbean plantations. Robert Milligan and George Hibbert, principal promoters of the docks, had substantial West Indian and slave-trading interests.↩
London Museum, “West India Docks”. Moist, gritty sugar cut the hands, necks and heads of workers carrying the sacks; the passage between warehouses became known as Blood Alley.↩
Historic England, “Warehouses and General Offices at Western End of North Quay”. After British colonial slavery was abolished, the docks continued to receive commodities from economies in which slavery persisted, including coffee from Cuba and Brazil.↩
London Museum, “West India Docks”, and Historic England, “The entrance to Port East Apartments, formerly warehouses at West India Docks”. The docks were badly damaged during the Second World War; only the western two of the original North Quay warehouses survived. Reconstruction returned the docks to full activity within about a decade.↩
London Museum, “West India Docks” and “The history of the Docklands Light Railway”. Larger ships and containerisation shifted freight handling towards the deep-water port at Tilbury. West India Docks closed in 1980, and the loss of port activity removed thousands of Docklands jobs.↩
London Museum, “The history of the Docklands Light Railway” and “New Port, New City: 1945–present”. The London Docklands Development Corporation was established in 1981. Regeneration attracted major investment but also local opposition, particularly over affordable housing and the distribution of benefits.↩ ↩
London Museum, “The history of the Docklands Light Railway”. Queen Elizabeth II opened the DLR ceremonially on 30 July 1987; public services began on 31 August. The original system had fifteen stations and was conceived as an instrument of Docklands regeneration.↩
UK Parliament, “Canary Wharf”, House of Commons written answers, 23 July 1987, and Survey of London, “Modern Docklands: The background to redevelopment”. The 1987 agreement between the LDDC and Olympia & York covered the large Canary Wharf office scheme and included a substantial developer contribution towards extending the DLR into the City.↩
KeolisAmey Docklands, “History of the DLR”. Canary Wharf DLR station opened in November 1991.↩
Survey of London, “Gazetteer of modern non-housing developments”, and The Guardian, “Canary Wharf timeline: from the Thatcher years to Qatari control”. Following the property downturn, Olympia & York sought bankruptcy protection and Canary Wharf entered administration in 1992.↩
Transport for London Corporate Archives, Research Guide No. 44: A Brief History of the Jubilee Line, and UK Parliament, “Canary Wharf”, 23 July 1987. The Jubilee Line Extension connected central, south and east London through the Docklands; private contributions from the Canary Wharf development formed part of the transport funding arrangements.↩
Foster + Partners, “The Making of Canary Wharf Underground Station”, and Transport for London Corporate Archives, Research Guide No. 44. The approximately 300-metre station was constructed by cut-and-cover within a former dock. Its roof became a landscaped park, while curved glazed canopies draw daylight into the concourse. TfL’s guide describes it as the cathedral-like showpiece of the extension.↩ ↩
Transport for London, “Jubilee Line Extension in 1999”. Canary Wharf Underground station opened on 17 September 1999 as the extension entered service in stages.↩
Transport for London, “Canary Wharf the penultimate Elizabeth line station transferred to TfL”. The station was built in the North Dock beneath Crossrail Place. Construction involved pumping out nearly 100 million litres of water and excavating approximately 300,000 tonnes of material; finds included part of a woolly mammoth jaw and ancient amber.↩
Transport for London, “All aboard the transformational Elizabeth line”. The central section of the Elizabeth line, including Canary Wharf, opened to passengers on 24 May 2022.↩
Historic England, “Warehouses and General Offices at Western End of North Quay”. Numbers 1 and 2 Warehouses are the two surviving buildings from the original North Quay range. Number 1, built in 1802–04 and later enlarged, became the Museum in Docklands in 2003.↩
London Museum Docklands, visitor information and “New Port, New City: 1945–present”. The museum occupies a surviving West India Dock warehouse and interprets four centuries of port history, including London’s role in sugar, empire and slavery.↩