The Isle of Dogs was once a crooked finger of a broken marshland and waterways that pushed down like a peninsula from the north side of London into the Thames. The Thames wound its way around the spur of land. Historically, it was a bit of a watery wasteland, but close enough for some folk to find use for it. One of the kings occupying Greenwich Palace reputedly kept his hunting dogs here, his greyhounds. It came to be called the Isle of Dogs. More and more boats hooked up at docks that came to be built around its banks. By 1802 this spur of land had become one of the largest shipping ports in the world with warehouses stacked with breadfruit from Gran Canaria and tea chests from the East; sailors and dockers a'hoeing as they worked. It became a throbbing hub of ships, taverns and hovels until the docks found a home further east, in deeper waters.
Then, for a time the Isle of Dogs lay unkempt and uncared for, until wealthy men with big ideas decided to turn this valuable land, just 2 miles from the city, into residential and commercial buildings. Canary Wharf. Twenty years ago the first building, One Canada Square, went up on the old West India Dock between the North and Middle Dock. It is a blocky stainless steel monolith rising up like Excalibur out of the old fragile marshlands. Over the years since, the London and European banking community have taken this opportunity to grab more space away from the crowded heart of the city, and now their glass and steel monoliths have multiplied; so far there are some 37 buildings over 97 acres literally blocking the sky. Barclays. Citigroup. Credit Suisse. J P Morgan. Met Life. Morgan Stanley. It is an amazing feat of civic engineering. And quite awesome.
Its development and progress has all been much of a giant financial juggling game with financiers playing with money like monopoly pieces over the decades. Today, it is mainly in the hands of the Qatari Royals along with their partners, a Canadian investment group, I think, after other moneyed folk lost their shirt on it. We didn't want to love it, but walking between Jubilee Place through Canada to Crossrail Place it is so spectacular, so all embracing, and so beautifully crafted, it is hard not to.
It is currently home to some 105,000 people daily pouring in and out of their places of work, with shopping malls, residential apartments and workspaces nesting side by side. With its own Canary Wharf underground connecting it like a vein to the city transport artery: part of a larger hub. A city within a city, in concept. Most days, though, those who live and work here likely don't need to go any place else. For anything much at all. Even art galleries and music performances find their way here. With the average salary earner taking home something in the vicinity of £100,000 a year, they can well afford it all, too.
There are even trendy pop-up boxes for a quick coffee jab for those on the run. The walkways just to get from one building to another are themselves works of art in engineering. Yet the old has not been forgotten. Old metal cranes that once pulled sacks and containers out of the bowels of ships still stand in places like bulky statues, enhancing the setting. Alongside their modern counterparts. Boulevard cafes have evolved so folk can sit and enjoy the spectacle. Stylish old dock buildings still survive, surrounded by the new. Residential, many of them. Serving important functions, too. There are several Day Care facilities pocketed throughout. A boon to working parents. And tiny tots take an educational stroll around their fancy neighbourhood each and every day they told us: strung together like a collection of soft toys.
Old platforms have been left to illustrate how goods were loaded directly from the ships into the warehouse: their metal bits and chains a lovely contrast to the new. Historic colonnaded walks have been kept. While new ones have sprouted: sharply different.
There is even green space if you need it, though you do have to go hunting for that. Atop the Crossrail building a roof garden has been built covered with a terrarium style roof, inspired by the old Wardian cases that botanists once used to collect interesting plant specimens. The garden beneath this is a fantasy of palms and ferns from all parts of the hemisphere. Beautifully labelled. A small herbarium of exotic plants. A place for rest and reflection, too, for busy minds. And there were lots of seats about with suited business folk taking time out for a little peace, a little quiet.
The entire building is shaped like a boat, suited to the setting. The craftsmanship everywhere is quite stunning. Even toilets have become starkly beautiful. And a staircase or an escalator comes to look like a piece of modern metal art. There are 20 in the Canary Wharf station alone. Walls have been built shiny and hard, yet extraordinary in their very simplicity and reflectivity. And beyond the bounds of Canary Wharf development spreads in a ripple effect. Modern buildings, replacing ruins, stretch on all sides as far as the eye can see.
Underneath all this surface development a new underground line is being dug, two tunnels at a time up to 40 metres below where we stand. Most of the afternoon we spent in the wonderful Docklands Museum, built into floors of one of the old warehouses, beside all the new construction. It told us all about the amazing drills that have bored through the earth beneath our feet. Work is nearly finished. Phyllis and Ada, two of the giant boring machines have been buried underground: they were too heavy and too expensive to retrieve. The new Elizabeth line is due to be in operation within the next year so access between Canary Wharf and Heathrow will be amped up to high speed.
The museum displayed amazing artefacts that archaeologists have been unearthing over the years of the build: from Roman to Medieval to Victorian. Some of the hippo sandals, horseshoes, from the Roman era look just like full metal shoes. Some of the artefacts from the dock era were also on display: old container weighing scales that used to hang from the ceiling. Every item that entered the warehouses was meticulously weighed and marked. And sometimes the product, as in the case of sugar, was tested.
There was a metal cage on display that was used for the bodies of pirates and ne'er do wells. They were hung for days in one of these strung from the gibbet down on Execution Docks after they had been tarred as "a great terror to all persons from committing ye like crimes". While an entire wooden set has been built on the bottom floor, called Sailorland: it illustrates a warren of shops, taverns and haunts, showing how Docklands once looked in the days when sailors, and not suits, roamed its busy streets. In the days when streets between work and home were open to the sky: not man made marble corridors lit by lights and temperature controlled. A wonderfully place. Nostalgic, even.
