My friends and I got into a fiery debate on Friday night. We were sipping glasses of fizz in a floating, wood-fired hot tub in Canary Wharf’s Docklands, gliding past the glittering office blocks, loudly dissecting this week’s gossip. But it wasn’t a chaotic love bomber or a sloppy office romance that got us fighting. It was London lore — an ethnographic spat of sorts. Was Canary Wharf cool? We were divided.
For some, it is sterile and soulless. But I suspect the people who say that are the ones who have not visited in a while. For until very recently, not many people thought Canary Wharf was cool. It is not somewhere Londoners tend to go unless they have to. A former disused Docklands site, named after a quay where fruits and vegetables were unloaded from the Canary Islands, Canary Wharf was transformed into a financial district in the 1980s (the marketing slogan of the development said that it “would feel like Venice and work like New York”).
