This was nowhere more evident than in the conception and creation of “Docklands.” The Docklands Development Corporation was established in 1981 to restore or renew the wasteland left by the closure of the London Docks; Wapping, Rotherhithe, the Isle of Dogs, Silvertown, north Woolwich and Beckton were within its boundaries and a number of enterprise zones-rate-free and tax-free catchment areas-were marked out for especial attention. The London City Airport, the Docklands Light Railway, and an extended Jubilee Line, were the designated means of transport. But, as in most London developments, the results were largely unplanned and unpredictable. The fate of Canary Wharf was in that sense emblematic. Its central feature was an 800-foot tower surmounted by a pyramid (which might provoke thoughts of imperial destiny) with approximately ten million square feet of office space. The original developers withdrew from the scheme and their replacement, the firm of Olympia amp; York, was reduced to bankruptcy even as the tower was nearing completion. A third consortium took over the project, even though a surplus of office space in the rest of the capital mitigated against early success. And yet, somehow, it worked. Tenants were found, and the whole of Canary Wharf flourished.
Docklands itself experienced a similar fate. Wild fluctuations in the urban economy left it balancing between triumph and disaster on a number of occasions; its apartment blocks were fashionable one year, and unfashionable the next; there were complaints about rudimentary transport facilities as well as the absence of shops, but nevertheless there was continual development. Michael Hebbert, in London, has remarked that there were “few preconceptions as to what should occur,” and that this “hands-off approach produced a curiously piecemeal environment.” Yet in that respect it followed the pattern of most London growth, which is no doubt the reason for its success. Docklands “had no overall philosophy for the massing and scale of buildings, or for the layout of public spaces,” but that is why it has become a natural and recognisable extension of London. The entire area was accused of “aesthetic incoherence” and a “market-driven disregard of social policy” but these are precisely the conditions and circumstances in which the city has expanded and flourished; it understands no other principles of life.
That is the context in which the great tower of Canary Wharf, which dominates the London skyline, has won in Hebbert’s words “immediate acceptance and affection.” This great shaft, so in tune with the alignment of the city, now rivals the Monument and Big Ben as the symbol of London. It represents, too, the single most important shift in urban topography for many centuries; the commercial and social pressures had always edged westwards, but the development of Docklands has opened up what has been called London’s “eastward corridor” which in historical and structural terms offers passage and access to Europe at a time when London’s economy is becoming more closely associated with the continent. There is a suspicion that the City of London-as well as the banks and brokers newly moved to Docklands- will come to dominate the financial markets of the European Community. Here, in this steady progress eastwards, we may be able to sense London’s instinctive and almost primordial reaching towards money and trade.
It is appropriate to mention here the “Big Bang” which transformed the City in the autumn of 1986; that explosion turned the Stock Exchange into the International Stock Exchange, enabled the merger of banking and brokerage houses, finished the system of fixed commissions and introduced “electronic dealing.” It was not the beginning of the City’s triumphalism; the phenomenon of young urban professionals named “yuppies” had been first noticed in 1984: a group who, in the phrases of the period, wished to “get rich quick” before “burn-out.” But the events of 1986 heralded a sea-change in the position of the City of London. Its foreign exchange market is now the most advanced and elaborate in the world, handling approximately one-third of the world’s dealings; with 600,000 employed in banking and allied services it has become the largest exchange in the world. Once more London was fulfilling its historical destiny, and recovering the pre-eminence which it had achieved in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is an historical achievement in more than one sense since, as Hebbert has explained, “The compactness of a 2000-year old urban core is fortuitously well suited to the operation of a globalised financial service centre.” Whether it is entirely “fortuitous” is another matter, however, since the actual nature of that square mile seems uniquely possessed by the spirit of commerce. There have been booms and busts, but it has maintained its ascendancy.
A new type of commercial activity, however, demanded new forms of building. That is how the City changes, while keeping its identity intact. The demand was for large open spaces which could accommodate the miles of cables attached to electronic activity and which could harbour thousands of employees working under consistent pressure. There was, after all, a human cost to this fresh access of trade. In the late 1980s some four million square metres of office space were added to the stock of the City, not least with the development of the Broadgate complex. Light-sensitive blinds and prismatic blue-green glass shielded the devotees of finance as they continued, night and day, with their dealings and transactions. All the gods and griffins of the City protected them.
What gods were these? Who can say? In 1986 Faith in the City, a report sponsored by the archbishop of Canterbury, noted that it was “the poor who have borne the brunt of the recession, both the unemployed and the working poor. Yet it is the poor who are seen by some as ‘social security scroungers,’ or a burden on the country, preventing economic recovery. This is a cruel example of blaming the victim.” It is one of the great and continuing paradoxes of London life that the rich global city contains also the worst examples of poverty and deprivation. But perhaps that comprises the “meaning” of London. Perhaps its destiny is to represent the contradictions of the human condition, both as an example and as a warning.
The report also described those council estates which “have a quite different social and economic system, operating almost entirely at subsistence level, dependent entirely on the public sector … the degeneration of many such areas has now gone so far that they are in effect ‘separate territories’ outside the mainstream of our social and economic life.” These sentiments will be familiar to those who have studied the social topography of London over the centuries; Charles Booth’s “Poverty Map” of 1889 might provoke a similar analysis, for example, with the proviso that there was then no public sector to support the indigent and the unfortunate. Once more it is the condition of London itself which is being described. If the city had a voice it might be saying: There will always be those who fail or who are unfortunate, just as there will always be those who cannot cope with the world as presently constituted, but I can encompass them all.