(pictured: 1 Park Drive by Herzog & de Meuron)
If a 23-storey block of flats* wasn’t safe, how can one can 3 times higher** be permitted?
Why is it so high? How safe is it? What’s it like living in buildings like this, or near them?
To find out, we’re going to the Isle of Dogs***, where residential high-rises, in Canary Wharf and its fringes, are among the tallest buildings in the UK, in any use.****
As originally master-planned in the 1980’s, Canary Wharf was a car-based North American office estate, within a 20 minute high-speed free-flowing car ride from the City of London.
Outside the estate there was no master plan: a clutter of about 20 uncoordinated privately-developed residential buildings have grown up along Marsh Wall and Millharbour, starting with CZWG’s 1987 20-storey ‘Cascades Tower’.
It was 2021 before Canary Wharf’s residential arm, Vertus, opened the first residential building inside the estate, the 58-storey Newfoundland Quay, the tallest build-to-rent tower in the UK.
But starting in the 2000’s, before the Global Recession, the pandemic, and hybrid-working, Canary Wharf’s owners had been planning a residential quarter in the hitherto undeveloped 10 ha eastern edge of the estate, called ‘Wood Wharf’.
15 years ago, a masterplan was agreed with a simple layout of car-free streets and squares, homes for 10,000, schools, shops and cafes, designed to create a London-like ground level, connected to the rest of the Isle of Dogs, and a mix of building uses and sizes, so the area might eventually feel like an organic piece of the ‘city’.
Every building, and every apartment, even at lower levels, would look out over either open water, public space or park, a real advance on the poor outlook, acoustics, and air-quality in lower-level flats of many high-rises elsewhere, often used for social rent housing.
Work by Allies+Morrison, Stanton Williams and AHMM and a high-end high-rise too: the cylindrical, 57-storey, 484-dwelling, 1 Park Drive by Herzog & de Meuron.
Along the quayside, echoes of Chicago's Lakeshore Drive, with a 53-storey homage to Mies van der Rohe’s unbuilt 1922 glass skyscraper project for Berlin’s Friedrichstrasse, designed by KPF.
In fact, Wood Wharf’s lavishly-planted pedestrianised public realm maybe the closest we will see in London to the Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse vision of ‘Towers in a Park’.
Meanwhile, up and down the original core of the ‘Wharf, big banks, with big buildings, their logos on top, are moving back to the City of London (to premises half the size, but with twice the quality of life).
Canadian Asset Manager Brookfield and the Qatari Investment Authority, joint estate owners, are rushing to enliven the public realm and convert some redundant office towers to flats.
However, to be eligible for one of Vertus’ apartments, your joint income must be 30 times the monthly rent, the lowest of which is about £2K for a studio apartment.
Our walk is a more affordable way to experience some awfully good--and expensive!--public realm.
And if you haven't been to Canary Wharf for a while, we will see, along the way, the best of the original Post-Modern buildings and later interesting architecture, plus there is a lot of fun to be had, and spectacle to be seen!
In the charming, cool and shaded Pinnacle Park, I will briefly outline the changes in regulation brought in by the authorities in after the Grenfell Tower fire.
Please join me at the Crossrail Place exit from Canary Wharf Elizabeth Line station, at the top of the second flight of escalators, by the yellow switch-room doors, at noon on Saturday 31st May, and, after our tour, for coffee, drinks and snacks!
*Grenfell Tower, subject of our last walk ‘The Fire and the Future’.
** the 75-storey Landmark Pinnacle in Marsh Wall
***the 325 ha peninsula in Tower Hamlets bounded by a meander in the River Thames. It includes the 50 ha private estate called Canary Wharf.
****for example, the Landmark Pinnacle, Newfoundland Quay, the Aspen and Valiant Towers, and 1 Park Drive are the 4th, 7th, 8th, 10th and 9th highest buildings in the UK.
