1 · Position
The London Docklands Development Corporation was created in 1981 and the Isle of Dogs declared an enterprise zone with tax incentives. Take-up was slow until Olympia & York arrived in 1987 under a master building agreement worth £3 billion — about £9 billion today. One Canada Square opened at 244 metres and remained the tallest building in the United Kingdom for twenty years; the first tenants came in 1991. By 2005 most British high street banks and many national newspapers had moved their head offices there.
2 · Why it is in the Library
Paul Reichmann's account of how he decided is the entry. He held twenty-nine meetings with London business leaders, found the great majority unhappy with their premises, and concluded that they believed they had no choice. Canary Wharf exists because someone worked out that an entire city's executive class disliked where it was and had never been offered an alternative — which is the same insight, at civic scale, that every luxury operator makes about a market.
3 · What the district then required
It could not work without transport, and the transport followed the buildings rather than preceding them: the Docklands Light Railway and City Airport in 1987, the Jubilee line extension in 1999. Then the hotels, restaurants and residential came, and Wood Wharf later moved the estate deliberately away from the corporate banking aesthetic of the original.
4 · Candour
The regeneration ran into serious financial trouble and Olympia & York did not survive it intact — the district was completed under different ownership, which the celebratory accounts tend to compress. A district built on tax incentives and a single tenant class is also exposed when that class changes its mind, and the Library records that the estate has been adding residential and leisure precisely because the office monoculture proved fragile.