There have been enormous successes, of course, many of which were trumpeted in a special report commissioned by Canary Wharf to mark this year’s 30th anniversary. “People who live round the edge don’t all feel as though it’s their space to go into and it feels quite smart and City and businesslike.” “For lots of people, that was new territory, but there’s an invisible wall now, isn’t there?” he says. Holtam remembers taking his congregation to a special service beside Millwall dock. Residents objected to the unelected nature of the London Docklands Development Corporation, the quango in charge of planning: there were marches and protests, one involving 60 dog-driven sheep and more than 150 bees. He was appointed to the local church in 1988 with an episcopal remit to try to improve community relations. Someone who remembers these times keenly is the Right Rev Nick Holtam, now the bishop of Salisbury.
Photograph: Richard Baker/Corbis via Getty Images In 1991, children build their own towers out of crates as a newly-constrcuted Canary Wharf looms in the background. The transport, shopping and leisure opportunities might have been revolutionised, but for a surprising number living there, Canary Wharf appears just as impenetrable as the docks were when I was a child. Local deprivation levels are among the worst in the country and a sense of powerlessness, which may have started as a reaction to the unaccountable regeneration scheme, now seems more widespread. I thought things could only get better for everyone living there, yet it took the surprise of Brexit to make me realise that the reality has been very different. My mum and sisters still live on the island and I go back all the time when the development first started, I had just gone to university and each holiday brought a new road network to negotiate and a new building site to discuss. At the same time, the extremes of income inequality – from great wealth to desperate deprivation – have revealed social tensions that bedevil the country as a whole. Yet the past three decades have not only tracked the boom and bust of the UK economy but have left the Isle of Dogs a microcosm of the social revolution that has changed the face of Britain. Canary Wharf’s first building, the second tallest in the UK after the Shard, is now as much a part of London’s skyline as the Empire State in New York and the area, with a further massive expansion already under way, is now more Wall Street than wasteland.
But now, Canary Wharf provides as many jobs as the docks did when they acted as a linchpin between the City of London and the global trade of the British empire.
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