When did you last go to an office? This week, as hybrid working moves towards being a legal right, Britain was revealed to be second only to Canada in the global work-from-home league. Since lockdown, its office working has fallen by more than a quarter, an average of one and a half days a week. Covid has revealed the truth, that white-collar staff are not 9-5 factory workers in disguise. Digital has freed “work” from the prison of geography. An office is the whole wide world.
Cut to the memorial citadel of Britain’s office age, east London’s Canary Wharf. I can remember when it was on its way to being the Shoreditch of the East End, its warehouses colonised by film-makers and artists. It would today be dancing all night. Instead, it was transformed by Margaret Thatcher’s infatuation with the developer Paul Reichmann’s plan to build a European Wall Street. She made the wharf the biggest state-funded project in UK history. She and her environment secretary, Michael Heseltine, hurled money at it. They declared Canary Wharf’s entire building programme a tradable tax dodge, costing taxpayers billions. They freed it of property taxes. They built it two new railways – the DLR and Jubilee line – a spaghetti junction of motorways and the most expensive road scheme in Britain per mile, the Limehouse Link.
No one has been able to compute the subsidies to Canary Wharf before and after its initial bankruptcy in 1992, but they are roughly the equivalent of those to all deprived areas outside London combined. Even within the capital, it consumed 80% of transport investment in the 1990s. Ask why the north-south gap grew so wide over the past two decades and a big answer is Canary Wharf. It must rank as one of capitalism’s greatest steals from the state of all time.
Stand now on a Monday or Friday at the corner of the wharf’s Montgomery Street, fashioned to imitate New York, and you will see tomorrow’s desert. The HSBC tower is all but empty and Barclays tower looks much the same. HSBC reckons only a small minority of its staff – perhaps 10% – use the building and announced last month it was going back to a smaller building in the City of London, “next to St Paul’s”. The corporate lawyers Clifford Chance are going west too, as are many others.
The City is cock-a-hoop, though a walk down its Gresham Street can be almost as bleak as round Canary Wharf. The new slab at 22 Bishopsgate, so ugly it defies even a nickname, is desperately calling itself “Europe’s first vertical village”, and a “co-working space” for drop-by hybriders.
When Canary Wharf first went up, I imagined it would one day become like Shelley’s Ozymandias ruin, its “vast and trunkless legs of stone … that colossal wreck, boundless and bare”. Ivy would crawl up its steel-and-glass walls and squatters occupy its galleries. I later ate my words. Canary Wharf was not badly designed – unlike London’s Bishopsgate quarter – and the place seemed to fill up fast enough.
Now I am not so sure. How can a London slavishly devoted for half a century to random high-rise office developments cope with a one-third collapse in the demand for office space? It will not reverse. In Germany, the fall in demand is more than a half, and in New York even the Empire State Building is in trouble.
Go to most of Europe’s big cities – Paris or Milan or Berlin – and they have controlled and isolated their office clusters. By contrast, urban planning in Britain has all but collapsed under sustained developer pressure on central and local government. London’s three philistine mayors have been a disaster. Offices have simply risen where borough competes with borough. The City destroyed its conservation areas to compete with Canary Wharf and is now losing out to Westminster as a result. Westminster’s wealth of attractive neighbourhoods is clearly the reason.
Camden is now trying to build an outrageous tower overlooking the British Museum and Lambeth a tower cluster behind St Thomas’ hospital, directly opposite parliament and part of an emerging canyon from Southwark to Battersea. Meanwhile, Michael Gove is in a funk over whether to permit a monster slab right next to the National Theatre.
None of this is “planned” or zoned, as it would be in a civilised city. All that happens next is that the market will speak. People use cities increasingly for leisure and creative activity. They want stylish, informal, human-scale spaces, as is offered in London by the West End and fringe neighbourhoods. They are why value attaches to Manchester’s northern quarter, Birmingham’s Gas Street Basin and Jewellery Quarter and Liverpool’s waterfront. People will go to where old buildings convert easily to new, a feature seemingly unique to Victorian cities.
As for the future of offices, goodness knows. Germany is pioneering low-cost housing conversion. But it is not easy to convert a 40-storey office block into family living. Replumbing is a nightmare while servicing a tower is vastly more expensive than a terrace or low-rise block. The attempt to convert Soho’s Centre Point office block, empty for half a century, into flats has hit tenants with a £240,000 repair bill. The same must surely apply to Canary Wharf’s residential towers. Why would anyone pay a fortune to live miles from London’s life and buzz when they don’t need to go to a local office block? I would bet money that many of them end up as social housing.
Canary Wharf was, in truth, an attempt by the state to thwart the natural evolution of the city. It traduced its own history as it pillaged adjacent Poplar. It will in time morph into line with east London’s historic character, to be where less affluent people live. It will be none the worse for that, though it may then wish it had kept the old warehouses. This is what happens when greed is unconstrained, government is stupid and planning, once a noble profession, is abused.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
