Canary Wharf Walking Tour with Open City Friends - Saturday 18 February 2023, 10.30am

Join Open City Friends for a walking tour exploring the history and ideas behind the changing architecture of Canary Wharf and East India Docks

This walking tour around the northern end of the Isle of Dogs – starting at Canary Wharf and finishing at East India Docks – takes in the area’s history as the industrial centre of a global trading empire with strong colonial ties to the empire, through its industrial decline, regeneration and recent construction boom. Once a relatively isolated part of industrial London, the area is now a financial district with towering office skyscrapers, new homes, landmark retail centres and multiple transport links to the rest of the capital. 

This tour will tell the story of the original West India Dock complex built by Robert Milligan – whose statue outside the Museum of London Docklands has recently been removed following Black Lives Matter protests around the world. Here, the dock complex and the Grade I-listed sugar warehouses offer a rare glimpse of the area’s colonial past as a vast landscape created to receive the products of empire and slavery.

Moving on to a dramatic viewpoint revealing one of the River Thames’ most enigmatic post-industrial landscapes, the tour will then discuss some of the early docklands developments in Surrey Quays, Rotherhithe and Wapping, and the later work of the London Docklands Development Corporation. The unique planning and ideas behind the early approaches to rethinking London’s formerly derelict docks will be compared to the later thinking behind the private sector-led Canary Wharf development and some of the more recent towers going up on the island. 

Passing through the former West India Docks complex, still apparent as vast expanses of water alongside the new banking towers, the tour will consider Reuters Plaza and the transformation of the area from one of toil, industry and colonial extraction to one of big banks, finance, shopping, recreation and luxury living. It will then pass through Crossrail Place’s roof garden before travelling on to East India Dock – originally created to receive tea, spices, indigo, silk of the East India Company which had been key to the creation of the British Empire – where a 1990s office complex has recently been reinvented as a multi-use campus with landscaped public realm and spaces for local charities.

Led by an expert guide on London’s architectural and social history, participants will examine the success of the area in the context of the incoming Elizabeth Line, Covid and the shift to working from home as well as the impact of Brexit. Referring back to the area’s strong links to empire, colonialism and slavery – the tour will also ask what the area’s future might hold as well as what the former docklands’ relationship to its many surrounding communities might be.  

Key information

Meet: Outside West India DLR station

Duration: 2 hours approx

Tour end: Republic building 2 Clove Cres E14 2BE (near to East India DLR station)