Lino Caboso has been serving chicken and rum punch at Rudie’s Jerk Shack in Canary Wharf since it opened in March 2021, one of several pop-up food stalls in Reuters Plaza, around the corner from Tube Station and Park.
It was pretty quiet this time last year. “We had [less than] 100 customers a day when we opened a year ago.” Speaking on a hot Thursday in June, he checks the till and finds he has already placed 600 orders.
In the midst of the Covid pandemic, the number of bankers and other workers commuting to their offices in Canary Wharf has slowed to a trickle and the area has become a ghost town. Numbers have been rising steadily since January as Covid restrictions were lifted, says Shobi Khan, chief executive of Canary Wharf Group (CWG).
Journeys to the financial hub of Docklands are at around 70% of pre-pandemic levels. Photo: Canary Wharf
The property company has turned 52 hectares (128 acres) of wasteland in the east London docks into a new financial center in recent decades, with the rival towers of the City, the traditional home of banking, visible in the distance. Canary Wharf is now home to banks such as JP Morgan, Citigroup, Barclays, HSBC and Société Générale, as well as accountancy firm KPMG.
Like many firms, KPMG has moved to hybrid working, with almost half of its 16,000 UK staff now visiting the office at least one day a week.
As a result of the change in travel patterns, Canary Wharf is still much quieter on Mondays and Fridays, but Hahn says the picture is improving. “Every week people are seriously coming back – depending on the companies, some are at 70%, some companies are at 50%, but it’s growing all the time.”
The financial center is built on what was once a wasteland in the east London docks. Photo: Lee Maudsley
Transport for London (TfL) says journeys to the financial hub of Docklands are at around 70% of pre-pandemic levels, like the rest of the Tube network. At Canary Wharf station, excluding the new Elizabeth line, TfL typically recorded 305,000 departures per week, compared with 420,000 to 450,000 in May 2019. Weekends are back to normal levels.
A recent report by the Center for Cities found that working from home has left bars, cafes and restaurants in UK city centers up to 25% worse off than in 2019, with food and drink sales in central London during the working week have decreased by 20%.
Valentin Kinio, senior analyst at the think tank, said: “It’s been almost six months since we were all advised to travel to the office again, but journeys are still not as busy as they were. High levels of home working are a threat to the high street and in particular the hospitality sector, which pre-Covid was heavily reliant on inbound office workers. In places like Canary Wharf, the problem is perhaps even more acute than in central London, where retailers can also rely on weekday shoppers and tourists.”
However, she believes Canary Wharf will survive, noting that for high-skilled jobs there are big benefits to face-to-face meetings, although it may have to re-arrange some offices and retail space.
People travel to Canary Wharf to party because maybe they don’t want to go to the West EndAnthony Knight, Pergola on the Wharf
At nearby London City Airport, which was bought by a Canadian consortium in 2016 for a whopping £2bn, passenger numbers had recovered to 1m by May this year and are forecast to reach almost 3m in 2022.
However, passenger numbers are not expected to return to the 5.1 million seen in 2019 until 2024 at the earliest. To regain passengers, the airport is adding new routes including Thessaloniki, Santorini and Skiathos in Greece and Split in Croatia. Direct flights to Barcelona, Guernsey and Jersey will also be restarted.
Pergola on the Wharf, a restaurant near KPMG, opened last July and has been surprised by the strength of bookings, especially on weekends when evening meals are held. “People travel to Canary Wharf to party because maybe they don’t want to go to the West End,” says Anthony Knight, the restaurant’s director of sales and marketing.
But it’s also an “after-work beer” spot, attracting bankers and other office workers. “They are there in droves on a Wednesday night. Thursday is definitely the new Friday in London,” he says.
The area was a ghost town during the Covid lockdown, but the bars and restaurants are now seeing a return to office workers and weekend visitors. Photo: Nunzio Prena
In the autumn, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development is moving its London headquarters from the City to a 24-storey tower in Canary Wharf, which will house 2,500 staff. So is Genomics England, which analyzes sequenced genomes for the NHS to help find the cause of disease.
Khan also hopes to build a new life sciences cluster to rival those at Oxford and Cambridge. Canary Wharf is now home to the UK’s health regulator, the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency. CWG has teamed up with specialist developer Kadans Science Partner to build a 750,000 sq ft commercial laboratory building, the largest in Europe, and hopes to attract smaller biotech firms.
Khan echoes CWG’s mantra of getting people to “live, work and play” in the area. The first residents moved into high-rise blocks of flats on Wood Wharf in 2020, just across the water from the gleaming bank towers.
A mini golf course designed by artists Carl Meier and Carl Redman. Canary Wharf Group aims to encourage people to ‘live, work and play’ in the area. Photo: PA
CWG is building 3,600 homes on the 9-hectare (23-acre) Wood Wharf site, where timber was stored in the 19th century, with a new primary school opening in September. There are also plans for a private school. More than half of the 2,000 homes completed to date are for rent, including some at discounted market rates.
In July, the company hosts its first festival of art, music, comedy and theater over four days, and many events are free. It is hoped that Grandmaster Flash, the Barbadian-American DJ and rapper, Jocelyn Brown, the American R&B and dance singer, and Ronnie Scotts in-house jazz band will draw the crowds.
Crowds watch tennis and cricket. We hope that the summer events will attract more visitors. Photo: Sean Pollock
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