The Albert Square matriarch, Peggy Mitchell, once told her former husband’s brother (with whom she was romantically involved) “I’m old East End. Proper. You don’t mess with me”. Seemingly, what she meant by being “old East End” was that she was to be feared, rather than approached by in-laws for sexual encounters.
This toughness is typical of the East End, an area which has a history like maybe no other region in London. In this column I intend to look at the relationship between the East End of old and new, looking at the changes and the stalwarts in landscape, residents and culture, focussing on one street or district in each article.
Canary Wharf – Trade and Transport
Canary Wharf
Canary Wharf today is the land of the behemoths. It is a weirdly placed enclave in the famous great central meander of the Thames and serves as a series of unholy watchtowers, full of jokers and thieves in abundance, looking over the East End and, indeed, the rest of London, quietly pulling all of the strings of the city (mainly those of the purse).
Its modernity is truly inescapable and in all honesty is a bit of a burden on the place, leaving it feeling like a large dystopia of Orwellian proportions, but its history still runs through its core and its principles of trade and transport and its status as a worldly beacon of capitalism have hung in partly due to its geographical location and partly due to its allure.
Having been an integral part of the British Empire in the industrial age, this mini metropolis in the West India Docks of the Isle of Dogs has survived and become an integral part of the financial centre of the world in this current late capitalist age. Always ahead, Canary Wharf is served now by such new fangled transport ideas as the Dockland’s Light Railway and, when experienced, feels like some kind of graphic novel/sci-fi representation of a city cooked from the brains of Messrs Moore, Dick and Ballard.
Here there are no concerns for agricultural or ecological matters unless there is a fiscal gain. Here, in fact, there are no worries at all expect those to do with money. A truer representation of the hangover of the recently deceased Margaret Thatcher’s governance would be hard to find. This is Canary Wharf, where the business is business and nothing but.
Trade
Canary Wharf was formerly part of the old Port of London, the trade centre of the world, with docks aplenty bringing in goods natural and man-made to be sold on these shores or for fabrication. Arguably more importantly to the British Empire’s place as the largest economy in the industrial world, goods were also being shipped out from Canary Wharf for Great Britain to sell to the world, which is something that’s been lost.
This old docking station’s etymology lies in its previous function for Fruit Lines Ltd. as its Mediterranean and Canary Islands fruit trade hub. The company thus decreed in the 1930s that it be called Canary Wharf, surely not knowing that this small wharf would soon dwarf the rest of the city.
As a part of West India Docks (what we now call Canary Wharf is pretty much the old West India Docks almost in entirety) it was an element of a number which made up one of the world’s busiest docks, pulling tonnes of boats in and out of its shore like an electro-magnetic field of some power.
Canary Wharf, then, or at least West India Docks, was truly indispensable to London and was part of its financial core, much as it is today. A hub of incoming and outgoing fruit and the like, this East End legend killed more than Jack the Ripper, The Krays and any modern day gangsters put together due to lax health & safety and employment laws (by today’s standards). It was a beacon of early capitalism – all ships, smoke and long days – as much as it is now a beacon of late capitalism – all skyscrapers, suits and eateries.
Trade has been a constant here and now probably always will be with the likes of Citigroup, KPMG and Morgan Stanley having European or World headquarters here. Between Canary Wharf and the City of London lies more money per square mile than one dare think about (weirdly with a fair bit of poverty sandwiched in-between) and now that Canary Wharf has overtaken its cousin roughly 5 or so miles to the west as the largest employer of bankers in Europe, one can see no end in sight to the trading clout of this land of big bucks.
Transport
Along with trade comes transport. As such, Canary Wharf as a pioneer of trade has also been a pioneer of getting from A to B. The area we now call ‘Docklands’ saw ships arriving into, out of and through them at a Suez-like rate (OK, slight over-exaggeration) and, in turn, the docks and surrounding areas had to be both accommodating and forward-thinking in the approach to infrastructure – one only needs to look 3 miles west to Tower Bridge’s sensational and, still unmatched, middle parting roadway to see the ways in which London as a whole accommodated the docks.
In the modern day Canary Wharf has been at the centre of a transport revolution. The Docklands Light Railway and the extension to the Jubilee Line of London’s underground railway system were put in place certainly with Canary Wharf in mind, with the former being a result of the delay of the latter (in the 1980s when the DLR was put in place, the Jubilee Line extension had proven quite costly).
Everything about these two new lines into Docklands suggests a world borne out of a sci-fi or graphic novel – be it driverless trains (DLR) coasting into this odd metropolis of buildings whose roofs are generally hidden in the clouds, or be it the ascension from the Jubilee Line to the ground – all sliver galvanised open steel encasing in a portal of long escalators.
The DLR and the Jubilee Line at Canary Wharf add to the aura of a world which feels like something from ‘the future’ that was imagined in the 1970s and 1980s, where relentless capitalist building has given the landscape a totalitarian feel. Through these modern revolutions in transport, Canary Wharf is a flyover away from being a JG Ballard construct. It was, in its previous tenure, a straight inspiration for Charles Dickens. It clearly conjures up something mysterious in those who write and, while I am of no comparison to such heavyweights as the aforementioned, I myself know what a magical place this is to describe (albeit in this inferior incarnation before your eyes).
The transportation of Canary Wharf feels like teleportation to some of the great landscapes of great English novels, but has always been there to make sure that money can be made in the area. Quite literally, then, these routes in and out are gateways to commerce.
Standing at the Feet of Giants
Isaac Newton once wrote “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”. To be crude and use this lovely metaphor in a more literal sense, to stand at the giants of Canary Wharf’s feet has a suffocating feeling where one feels almost blinded, but nonetheless thrilled.
Indeed, if we place that metaphor back into its more abstract sense and stand on the shoulders of the literary giants that have looked at Canary Wharf (knowingly or not) and use their feelings on this kind of place, a place where trade and transport are kings, we can understand what a mystifying region of the East End this is.
Canary Wharf is a place that brings up seismic imagery, but inversely is often indescribable, unless, of course, your surname happens to be Ballard or Dick or Dickens or Conrad or Moore or…
