Docklands housing scheme to start after Canary Wharf Group secures government loanWork on a major housing development in London’s Docklands can now get under way after developer Canary Wharf Group received a £200m loan from the government.
Canary Wharf timeline: from the Thatcher years to Qatari control
Docklands estate, now home to financial heavyweights, is the creation of Canadian tycoon Paul Reichmann.
Canary Wharf is to be bought by Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund and Canadian investor Brookfield Properties for £2.6bn after Songbird, the owner of the Docklands estate, admitted defeat.
Canary Wharf takes its name from the quay where fruit and veg from the Mediterranean and Canary islands was once unloaded. The disused Docklands site, formed by a loop in the Thames, was turned into a second financial district to rival the City of London after 1987.
Cleveland Bridge, CanaryWharf, Londres
Concluída em junho de 2013
Today, Canary Wharf’s cluster of skyscrapers in east London is home to some of the world’s biggest banks, such as Citigroup and HSBC.
1988
Construction began.
1990
The 244m Canary Wharf skyscraper at One Canada Square, topped by a pyramid, was the first tower to rise out of the docks in 1990. It was Britain’s tallest building for two decades until it was overtaken by the Shard in 2010 (architecture critics thought it was too tall and Thatcher and Prince Charles didn’t like it either).
1991
The first tenants moved to Canary Wharf in 1991. The banks Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse First Boston, HSBC and Citigroup, and the Financial Services Authority all moved to the Docklands in subsequent years. Barclays was the last clearing bank to leave Lombard Street in the City for Canary Wharf, in 2005. Much of Fleet Street also decamped east, including the Telegraph, the Mirror and the Independent, although only the Mirror remains.
1992
But it wasn’t all plain sailing. In 1992, following a property crash, Olympia & York filed for bankruptcy and Canary Wharf was placed in administration.
1995
Undaunted, three years later Reichmann pulled together a consortium of wealthy investors (including Saudi Arabia’s Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal and the American media mogul Larry Tisch) to buy Canary Wharf back from the banks for £800m.
As the property market recovered and more firms moved to the Docklands, the business floated on the London stock market.
2004
Reichmann finally lost control of Canary Wharf during a fierce 11-month takeover battle, ending his 20-year involvement with the project. Canary Wharf Group was acquired by Songbird Estates, a consortium led by US investment bank Morgan Stanley.
2009
The Qatari Investment Authority became a major Songbird shareholder, after coming to the company’s rescue with China’s sovereign wealth fund in 2009, when Songbird almost collapsed under the weight of its debts.
2014
Canary Wharf is now spreading east, the first expansion of the estate since the 2008 financial crisis. There are plans for 30 buildings at Wood Wharf, including a 57-storey cylindrical residential skyscraper facing the waters of South Dock, designed by Herzog & de Meuron, the Swiss architects behind Tate Modern and the Bird’s Nest in Beijing.
The eastern extension is set to almost double the number of people working and living in the area within the next 10 years. It will get a big boost from Crossrail, the £16bn railway running east-west across London that is due to open in 2018.
London’s Canary Wharf gets greenlight for expansion
Canary Wharf, London’s second financial district, is set for a big expansion after the local council gave the go-ahead for the construction of more than 3,000 homes.
Songbird Estates on Tuesday said it had won planning permission for the first substantial extension to the business centre since the financial crisis, when the rapid growth of the area was arrested as banks and other financial groups retrenched staff.
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| Illustration of Wood Wharf's design by Herzog & de Meuron Financial Times |
The 4.9m sq ft project, formerly known as Wood Wharf and equivalent to about a third of the existing Canary Wharf footprint, will feature parkside town houses and high-rise buildings, including a cylindrical residential tower designed by Herzog & de Meuron, the Swiss architects behind the extension to the Tate Modern art gallery and the Beijing “Bird’s Nest” Olympic stadium.
Britain’s biggest commercial real estate companies are keen to increase their exposure to the country’s rapidly rebounding housing market, with about 40 per cent of their development programmes focused on residential schemes.
High-end property in the capital has been a particular focus, as developers rush to build luxury homes in London to take advantage of the capital’s rapidly rising house prices – though some fear there are signs the red-hot market is cooling.
Canary Wharf Group, the Songbird subsidiary, has been readying plans for the Wood Wharf site for much of the past decade as part of a move to open the area to residential use. It won approval for the first dedicated residential building at Canary Wharf in March, a 58-storey, 566-apartment development known as Newfoundland. (Continua)
Canary Wharf expansion plans to include 3,000 homes
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| Torre residencial (Herzog & de Meuron) emblemática de Wood Wharf, expansão residencial de Canary Wharf |
More than 3,000 homes will be developed on the eastern edge of Canary Wharf, alongside offices and shops, under revised plans for the Wood Wharf extension submitted on Tuesday morning by the business estate’s owners.
The Wood Wharf plans, which have been discussed over the past decade as Canary Wharf has grown to fill its existing estate to the east of London, mark the first significant housing development for the mainly commercial scheme.
Wood Wharf will be the first big extension to the business district since the financial crash, which held up the estate’s growth as financial groups froze hiring.
(..) The move is the latest step by commercial property developers into London’s residential market, where prices have risen sharply over the past couple of years. British commercial real estate investment trusts have also begun to develop new housing for sale. (Continua)
The myth that Canary Wharf did east London any good
There are few places so utterly implicated in our discontents as this symbol of the ludicrousness of 'trickle-down' economics
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Foto Oli Scarff / Getty Images / The Guardian
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Canary Wharf, the "second City", an "evil twin" to London's financial district, has overtaken his ancient rival, according to the Financial Times. It wouldn't be altogether surprising if some saw this as a cause for celebration. Canary Wharf, and the 1980s Docklands development of which it was the most successful part, was an enterprise zone, an idea that the current government is trying to revive. As an enterprise zone it was deliberately unplanned, low-tax, and in theory low on "big government", except for the not-so-small matter of massive public investment projects such as the Docklands Light Railway or the cleaning, dredging and decontaminating of the old industrial sites. Regardless, if it has "worked", then surely the coalition's new zones can point to it as some kind of model. One form of industry, the dock labour of the Port of London, was replaced with another, financial services. Around 80,000 jobs in the former, 150,000 in the latter. What could possibly be wrong with this?
Everything. Canary Wharf has been for the last 20 years the most spectacular expression of London's transformation into a city with levels of inequality that previous generations liked to think they'd fought a war to eliminate. Very, very few of the new jobs went to those who had lost their jobs when the Port of London followed the containers to Tilbury; those that did were the most menial – cleaners, baristas, prostitutes. The new housing that emerged, first as a low-rise trickle in the 80s and 90s followed by a high-rise flood in the 00s, was without exception speculatively built. Inflated prices, dictated by the means of a captive market of bankers, soon forced up rents and mortgages in the surrounding areas, a major cause of London's current acute housing crisis. (Continua)
