Today's (well, Friday week's) frolic through the concrete took us to one of Mr Internet's muses, the curious late Thatcher era relic that is Canary Wharf, a stark reminder of how we got into this mess and which financial institutions got us there but at the same time a powerful monument to the, uh, tasteful restraint of 1980s design. The booklet promised the usual raft of junk from Foster + Partners, but thankfully, not exclusively. Besides, Strategies' borderline perverse fixation with postmodernist architecture would ensure we wouldn't leave the Isle of Dogs without ogling plenty of unearthly delights in that style.
We were joined on this expedition by our good friend P, an OG East Londoner who enjoys a good walk and carries a wealth of arcane local knowledge. It was a nice crisp day for it, at least until the wind picked up (and we'll get to just how hard it picked up and why further on), and a perfect opportunity for Strategies to take our newly recallibrated ploughman's lunch for a test drive.
If you've never been to Canary Wharf, you'll definitely know when you've found it:
Our first designated stop was Crossrail Place, a surprisingly pleasing Foster job that feels like the boarding gantry to Jabba the Hutt's sail barge. The tunnel boasts a colourful interior by one of Strategies' favourite artists and designers, Camille Walala.
The next building we were directed to was a Horden Cherry Lee construction called Newfoundland. It was so perfectly average I don't seem to have even taken a picture of it, so here are some other things we saw on the way to the next stop:
The pamphlet then took us to the magnificent 10 Cabot Square (1991, unsurprisingly). Designed by an American firm and "exuding North American confidence", this is bad taste at its best; a place where not a single nook or cranny has been left unadorned. Sadly, most of this postmodernist oppulence appears to be going to waste, with the office space looking sparsely occupied even for a Friday afternnon, and the row of 1920s-referencing bar/shop units on the ground floor mostly gathering dust. Oh yeah, and we saw One Canada Square as well. You know, the one with the pyramid on top. That guy.
Hell is an outdoor pop up bar in Canary Wharf with obnoxiously loud funky house, made to look like a garden through the means of astroturf, flowers and drinks served out of brightly coloured garden sheds, and we carefully skirted around one such portal to the underworld on our way to Canary Wharf Jubilee Line station. The station was built in 1999 (seven years after the eastern extension of the line was approved) and is another example of Norman Foster being able to design something half decent when he puts his mind to it. Or perhaps I was merely charmed by its distinctly millennial optimism, as I am by many Y2K artefacts dotted around the city (see also: the Dome). This time Strategies failed to get any pictures through sheer forgetfulness rather than aesthetic distaste, so please enjoy some more assorted Canary Wharf miscellanea instead:
It was around this time that the weather took a turn for the dark, wet and windy, so we sacked off the guidebook's final destination (East India Dock House, a former Financial Times printworks) in favour of going for a pint. And Strategies knew just the place to go, but getting there involved passing the gustiest place in London, a point where even on a relatively calm day the built environment conspires to form a hellish wind tunnel, rendering the waters of Heron Quays choppier than a steak house. It was worth braving the elements, however, to soak in the gloriously unrestrained vulgarity of the Britannia International Hotel:
P and I supped our pints in the downstairs bar overlooking Heron Quays, and both agreed that in conclusion, there are many different areas of London, and Canary Wharf is certainly one of them. As promised, here is my high-spec ploughman's lunch which I ate in the bar, in defiance of house policy:
Fuck the system!