Isle of Dogs: The history of a lone wolf forever searching for its pack

Once a bustling dockland and later a financial powerhouse, Tower Hamlets’ Isle of Dogs faces yet another wave of transformation. As new developments loom, questions arise about the future of its community and whether the island will shed or deepen its infamous wealth divide.

The Long Good Friday is a legendary gangster flick, emblematic of a much wilder East End than the one we know today. Although its lead performances and Cockney iconography are memorable, it’s most striking as a record of London’s derelict Docklands. Released in 1980, the movie captured an undeveloped wasteland on the cusp of transformation into the business hub that is Canary Wharf. 

The Isle of Dogs offered a dramatic setting for London in flux – the peninsula extending from a still down-and-out East End into that river of opportunity, the Thames. This ‘Opportunity Area’ has come a long way, but remains one of the fastest-growing places in the UK, with 31,209 new homes in the planning pipeline. 

We’re investigating what that means for the people who live there now. Who benefits from regeneration, and will plans for the island reinforce the community, or replace it with a new resident demographic? In this first instalment of our six-part series, we’re looking back on the history of redevelopment on the Isle of Dogs – the lone wolf of Tower Hamlets. 

A rose by any other name

The Isle of Dogs is the southern peninsula of London’s East End created by a U-bend in the Thames. West India Quay separates this marshy outcrop from the rest of the borough.

The origins of the name are as murky as the river. It may or may not have something to do with kennels for King Henry VIII’s hunting dogs across the water at Greenwich Palace, though evidence is scant. It was only in 1987 that the ‘Isle of Dogs Neighbourhood Zone’ was created and the peculiar name became official. The area includes South Poplar, Blackwall, Millwall and Cubitt Town. 

Canary Wharf is the cluster of skyscrapers which, depending on who you ask, is either ‘on’ the Isle of Dogs, or is a separate district on the peninsula’s northern end. The official borough ward of Canary Wharf refers to about one-third of the island; the northwest corner.

However, most of the neighbourhood is technically private land, owned by the Canary Wharf Group and transformed from disused docks to a complex of skyscrapers during the 1980s. That’s why you’ll see car checkpoints and private security guards around the area, plus the Group’s logo in places you’d usually expect to see the Tower Hamlets borough symbol. It’s stamped on everything from rubbish bins to maps of the massive underground shopping mall, which connects the banking and business towers to the tube station below. CCTV cameras are in no short supply.

The district is named after the Canary Islands, one of the destinations from which tropical fruits were imported to the UK via the docks. Across the island, street names recall colonial conquest and the British trading empire – from Cuba Street to Admiral’s Way and Amsterdam Road.

We’ll use the terms ‘Isle of Dogs’ and ‘island’ interchangeably, referring to all land south of the A1261 road, also known as Aspen’s Way. This includes Canary Wharf and the rest of the peninsula to its south. 

Independence and isolation

The area’s isolation goes back long before skyscrapers marked the boundary with the rest of the borough. Residents have referred to themselves as ‘islanders’ since at least the 1800s, when they lived as a close-knit community of farmers. For 10 days in 1970, local Labour Councillor Ted Johns declared the island an independent state to highlight council neglect. Back then, the 277 bus was its only transport link. 

The construction of Canary Wharf did not link the island to the city. Instead, it attracted a commuter colony of (mostly) men in suits. Until recently, there has been little overlap between Canary Wharf’s white-collar workers and the Isle of Dog’s residents.

That sense of isolation – from Canary Wharf, and the rest of Tower Hamlets – has never left the island. The idea that the Isle of Dogs is just one part of a larger ‘docklands’ area is an invention of the 1980s. Before the London Docklands Development Corporation (LDDC) was founded in 1981, the area was simply ‘dockland’. 

This is an important distinction because it shows that the LDDC didn’t simply see this as the former terrain of the docking industry. It generalised the identity of the Isle of Dogs as one section of the LDDC’s expansive territory, stretching from Tower Bridge to Tilbury in Essex. The land around West India Quay, now Canary Wharf, was the key ‘enterprise zone’ of this blank canvas.

Gateway to the world

Shipping is the key to understanding why this ‘enterprise zone’ was invented. For most of London’s history, all international trade and travel passed through the Docks. They were essential to moving cargo freight and people in and out of London. The Docks were the reason Tower Hamlets became the key point of arrival for immigrants from France, Ireland and Asia. The area suffered serious bomb damage in World War II precisely because of its vital role in manufacturing and industry. 

The docks enjoyed their last gasp of glory in the 1950s,  just as post-war housing projects welcomed residents from other East End neighbourhoods decimated by the Blitz. By the 1960s, Tilbury Docks, located 20 miles east of the island, had become the main hub for river traffic. At over 700m wide, it was better suited to the modern shipping industry than the 350m width between the Isle of Dogs and Greenwich. 

Until then, Isle of Dogs residents had relied almost entirely on shipping-related industries for employment. The backdrop to the Port of London’s closure was the intention not merely to repair and replace post-war damage, but to start from scratch, demolish what was left and begin again. 

Thatcherite utopia

The founder of the LDDC was Michael Heseltine, a Conservative MP and Margaret Thatcher’s environment secretary. The derelict wasteland of abandoned shipyards appalled the politician when he saw it from a helicopter in the late 1970s. 

He established the LDDC (not to be confused with the more recent London Legacy Development Corporations or LLDC which developed Stratford’s Olympic Park) and set the agenda for a new Isle of Dogs. It would be a modern, state-of-the-art business district, fit for a country throwing itself head-on into private enterprise and free market capitalism, as per its Prime Minister’s economic policy. 

The Docklands Light Railway (DLR) and London City Airport opened in 1981. Canadian developers Olympia and York, led by Paul Reichmann, bought the Canary Wharf scheme from the LDDC in 1985. The firm built the iconic One Canada Square in 1990. You probably know it as the glass tower with the pyramid on top and, until the Shard came around in 2009, it was London’s tallest building. 

Olympia & York developed skyscrapers in New York’s financial district at the same time as Canary Wharf. One was the World Financial Center, now named Brookfield Place after the asset management firm Brookfield and a major shareholder in Canary Wharf. Developers primed the island for a new role as an international hub, but that role prioritised its identity as a global financial portal rather than a home for locals. Workers would trade in stocks, not crates of imports, and a new demographic would work on the island. The LDDC claimed that building new offices would generate construction and service jobs for the local community.

Most of the land that now forms the heart of Canary Wharf was previously a collection of abandoned quays and industrial sites. The corporation was given unprecedented freedom to purchase and redevelop the island, often using Compulsory Purchase Orders (CPOs). Planning constraints were relaxed and tax benefits were introduced to attract private investors.

A land divided

In 1991, commercial tenants began moving into this strange new Manhattan-on-Thames. Eventually, all major banks that traded in Britain arrived, from HSBC and Barclays to Citibank, Credit Suisse and JP Morgan. Newspapers like The Telegraph migrated to the island from Fleet Street. 

The LDDC created advertisements featuring their mascot, a black crow. Yet things remained shaky. A financial recession in 1992 bankrupted Olympia and York. The Canary Wharf Group (CWG) was formed in 1993, with private investors repurchasing the land in 1995. Today, Brookfield and the Qatar Investment Authority, a branch of the Qatari government, are the main stakeholders in the CWG.

But in 1994, the Survey of London commented: ‘It remains to be seen whether transport improvements will allow the Isle of Dogs to re-emerge as a commercial centre.’ 

Across the island, boards declaring it an ‘enterprise zone’ were vandalised – graffiti on the Barkantine Estate declared it a ‘yuppie-free zone’, referencing the class of ‘young urban professionals’ or ‘yuppies’ working in the new offices or living in refurbished warehouse apartments in Wapping, just west of the island. 

As is often the case with redevelopment, the extent to which locals benefitted was a grey area. Older people were glad it had become tidier and that houses were repaired. When the Jubilee Line extension to Canary Wharf opened in 1991, the island welcomed this much-needed connection to the rest of the Tube network.

At the same time, it reinforced the financial zone’s commuter culture. The people working in Canary Wharf were not the same people living on the island. Residents were cut off from Tower Hamlets and from a part of their own island, which was colonised by men in suits. 

For all its convenience, flashy new infrastructure largely supported the financial sector’s advancement, rather than providing for the community. Accounts from the 1990s highlighted the lack of child-friendly spaces and other amenities for residents:

‘The Isle of Dogs is a nice place to live but there is to [sic] much wasted land that is left here for ages. When they use it they build things we don’t need…’

An eleven-year-old suggested converting the since-demolished London Arena, which could seat 15,000 people, into a leisure centre. The sense of isolation comes through when children remember Asda, the island’s only supermarket at the time, repeatedly running out of food. Adults described the high rises in the same tone of vague fascination you might associate with a fairground attraction: 

‘…a City of Glass started to rise […] And then, stranger still, a great tower rose […] and it was empty, and it made an empty point in the empty sky.’ 

New wave crashing

With the new millennium came the heyday of Canary Wharf as a banking hub. Though the Financial Crash of 2008 reinforced the divide between the corporate elite and the island’s working-class residents, bankers’ bonuses did not go down in 2008 or the years that followed.

It took an entirely unpredictable disaster to shake the business enclave. During the COVID-19 lockdown, when the finance sector found itself working almost entirely from home, commercial tenants were still spending a fortune on office space they weren’t using.

Today, in the wake of the pandemic, most banks still follow hybrid working patterns and are keenly aware of the opportunity to cut costs by cutting down on office space. This has kicked off a reversal of the 1990s trend where major financial businesses left the City of London for Canary Wharf. High-profile tenants like HSBC and Reuters are moving back to smaller premises in the City of London when their Canary Wharf leases expire later this decade. 

The CWG has teased the idea of Canary Wharf becoming a life science and technology hub, but residential developments will likely dominate the next wave of regeneration. Planners are promising much-needed GP surgeries and schools to keep up with housing. 

New developments promise affordable flats, but ‘affordable’ often means 80 per cent of the market rate. You can imagine that is pretty high when most of the area’s recent tenants have been the richest banks in the world. It follows that the next wave of tenants will be high-earning employees of those banks or other elite sectors.

Uncertainty is nothing new for the island. It has a pattern of settling into a rhythm, only to see it disrupted. As a port, it built infrastructure to keep up with the rapid growth of trade – only to see the shipping industry fade into nothing. It has hardly had time to establish itself as a banking hub, and already the financial sector seems to have changed its mind about needing an island from which to operate. 

The question is, will long-time residents, especially those south of Canary Wharf, be able to remain on the island as another wave of change crashes ashore? While the promise of new housing and infrastructure brings hope, will it benefit the existing community many of whom rely on truly affordable housing, or will it cause a ripple of increased housing costs, deepening the divide and even ousting them from the island?

We’ll be exploring this as we continue to investigate this lone wolf, once again on the hunt for a new pack. 

If you enjoyed this article, we suggest reading: Streets in the sky: The utopian dreams of Poplar’s social housing