With a number of leases nearing their end, it is vulnerable to what a recent report for the corporation of London called a “flight to quality”.
The result, according to one property professional, is that Canary Wharf is “just being pulverised”. Its administrators, meanwhile, as part of their ongoing competition with Canary Wharf, have worked hard to animate the place with new restaurants, bars, bookshops and venues. Not that it was vivacious in the past – it was notorious for the eerie silence of its streets at weekends – but it was close to parts of the capital with spontaneity, richness and surprise. The City of London, with its winding medieval streets, couldn’t match the wharf for efficiency, but it had character and diversity of fabric. The City of London church of St Andrew Undershaft, a survivor of the Great Fire and the blitz, with the modern Gherkin building behind it. “It’s a soulless, horrible place with no character,” one worker there told the Financial Times, notwithstanding her appreciation for the bike storage and onsite gym offered by her company. It is beautifully landscaped and well maintained, and its 2,500 security cameras and teams of private guards might make it feel safe, but that’s not enough for many. The rap against the wharf has always been that it is dull and lifeless, no matter how hard its management tries to liven things up with open-water swimming and paddleboarding in the former docks, and an array of eating and drinking options. These buildings came in either beige or grey, so as not to compete with the corporate colour of whoever rented the space. It was an advantage of the HSBC tower that most of its 45 floors were close to identical so that departments could be shifted from one to another with a minimum of thought. In the unencumbered spaces of the old docks, its developers could readily build exactly what their occupiers wanted. In the rivalry for business between Canary Wharf and the City, which has been going on for more than 30 years, the former could offer efficiency. The intensity of people exiting its stations, and grabbing breakfast in its many food outlets, has appreciably dropped. If you go to Canary Wharf during rush hour on a Friday morning, it’s not exactly a ghost town but neither does it feel like the throbbing heart of one of the world’s leading financial centres. People still want to go to offices in the middle of the week, for the informal interchanges it allows with colleagues, but are less likely to make the trip at its beginning and end.
Its huge buildings, like the warehouses they replaced, are in danger of redundancy According to Transport for London, commuting levels on Mondays and Fridays are about half of their pre-pandemic levels, and 70% on Tuesdays to Thursdays. But HSBC’s planned move, and data on rail journeys, show that new habits have taken hold. “The work-from-home fanatics owe us an apology” thundered a recent Daily Telegraph article.
Taken together, these changes represent small steps forward for civilised living.īizarrely, sections of the conservative media have tried to make working from home a battlefield in the culture wars. Another, linked, factor is that office workers want more from their places of employment when they make their less-frequent visits than they did before – more pleasant environments, more liveliness when they go out on to the streets, more buzz.
High among the reasons for this moving and downsizing is the belief that “hybrid working”, the combination of working from home and in an office, is here to stay. It is part of a larger drift, which will also see the giant law firm Clifford Chance move from the wharf to the City.
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