Canary Wharf is better than ever

For the kind of people who think London ought to be all Farrow and Ball-coated quaintness and whiffs of Dickensianism, Canary Wharf is a rude assault, an obnoxious jungle of the anti-quaint. It is also, to many, an embarrassing paean to a moment that only the 1980s could have produced: one of gauche capitalistic, deregulatory optimism soused in international finance. One Canada Square, the frontispiece of the development and once Britain’s tallest skyscraper, is named in honour of the Toronto-based property developer who bought the project in 1988 (and a few years later went bankrupt).

Canary Wharf, once so bursting with raw power and money that everyone from newspapers to banks trekked out East, has become more of an outcast condemned to the periphery. The cacophonous sound of heels in a hurry tapping along the endless glossy floors of its mall and towers became more muted in the late 2000s when the sub-prime mortgage crisis hit.