Dr Rosamund Lily West is a lecturer and architectural historian. She currently lectures at West Dean and University of the Arts London as well as leading architectural walking tours of Woolwich and Canary Wharf for Open City. Previously, she was a Lecturer in Architectural Studies at the University of Manchester and worked at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, as a Research Fellow on the Survey of London. Before entering academia, she worked in museums for 15 years, holding curatorial positions at London Transport Museum, Kingston Museum and as Paul Mellon Research Curator at the Royal Society of Sculptors. She has appeared on UKTV’s ‘Secrets of the London Underground’, the Imperial War Museum’s YouTube channel, BBC Radio 4 and several podcasts. She is an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and an ECR advisory board member of the Centre for the History of People, Place and Community at the Institute of Historical Research. Here walking tours can be found here: https://open-city.org.uk/events. She can also be found on LinkedIn, Instagram, Bluesky and X
I am a lecturer and architectural historian with an interest in the industrial and working-class histories of London. Before entering academia, I worked in museums for fifteen years and so place real importance in object based learning. I extend the definition of objects to buildings and environments and often take students on walking lectures as well as giving walking tours for the charity Open City, https://open-city.org.uk/events
Born in the 1980s in south-east London, I watched from the other side of the Thames as Canary Wharf grew from one office tower, One Canada Square designed by Cesar Pelli and opened in 1991, to today’s cluster of offices – and, now, residential towers – at the northern end of the Isle of Dogs. For the last ten years I have led architectural walking tours of different parts of London for various organisations. These have been mainly based in east and south-east London, areas I have known since I was a child. I have been giving tours of Canary Wharf, the northern end of the Isle of Dogs and East India for most of that time.
One Canada Square, HSBC tower, Citibank tower and Chase/J. P. Morgan. Photographed by author from the 53rd floor of Wardian, 2025.
Walking has been something I have loved for most of my life. The freedom walking brings allows you to explore London in a way unlike any other. Experiencing London on foot best allows you to see and feel how areas change and relate to one another. The slowness of walking – as opposed to driving or cycling – enables you to experience London at its best. I do not rely strongly on the psychogeography tradition or the idea of the flaneur as practised by Guy Debord, Martin Coverley and, more specifically to London, Peter Ackroyd, Iain Sinclair and Laura Grace Ford. I do, however, borrow from Debord’s 1955 description of a city’s “zones of distinct psychic atmospheres”, which lends itself to Canary Wharf’s strangeness and distinctiveness from the rest of London well.1
The Canary Wharf area has a series of levels to confuse any map, without the familiar London streets, corner shops and pubs by which to navigate. On my tours, people often remark on the disorientation and strangeness of Canary Wharf and find it hard to navigate. Indeed, as O’Hara and Brownhill described in their article ‘From planning to opportunism? Re-examining the creation of the London Docklands Development Corporation’, it represents “a symbol of the death of comprehensive planning”.2 This is marked as, during tours, I walk people off the Canary Wharf estate, north-eastwards towards the Blackwall/Poplar area and so people get to see how Canary Wharf knits (or doesn’t) with the surrounding areas.
Canary Wharf is named after the wharf that once stood on that site and sits at the northern end of the Isle of Dogs – recognisable by the familiar U-shape bend in the River Thames. At its height, London was the busiest port in the world, the centre of industry and Empire and key to Britain’s colonial project. Canary Wharf is often viewed as the heart of London’s Docklands – a system of docks, wharves and warehouses on the river Thames that made up the Port of London for hundreds of years. Despite a brief post-war boom, the London docks closed one by one from the 1960s to the 1980s, to be replaced by one of the UK’s most ambitious urban regeneration projects.
If we go by the mantra that “Docklands is a state of mind” then Docklands can conjure up all sorts of imaginative scenarios and has a place in our cultural imagination.3 Having led walking tours of the area, over the years I have heard people say they feel they’re not in Britain at all but in the USA or Hong Kong and that the area feels cold and isolating. It is amusing, but no coincidence, that Canary Wharf was used as the backdrop for an evil empire in Star Wars’ Rogue One and Andor.
Canary Wharf, and London’s Docklands as a whole, remains a contested area. For some, Canary Wharf is the poster-boy for 1980s neoliberal, Thatcherite politics and the ultimate success story showing the power of removing bureaucracy, controls and red tape. For others, it represents ignored locals, helpless in the face of deregulated developers, gaping inequalities and the failure of trickle down economics. One of the things that is important about giving walking tours of Canary Wharf to the general public, as well as special groups such as university students and architectural firms, is ensuring I give a balanced view on history and don’t isolate people coming on the tours. This is particularly so with Canary Wharf as there can be people on my tour who have benefitted from the transformation of London’s docklands and there can also be people alienated from it. For instance, on more than one occasion, I have had docker’s families on my tours who describe the trauma of losing work and industry relied upon for generations.
Looking eastwards down at the original south dock towards Blackwall Reach and the Thames Barrier from the 53rd floor of Wardian. Photographed by author, 2025.
Discussing the area’s strong colonial links during a walking tour allows us to experience the visceral reality of Britain’s colonial project and the vast wealth this brought to Britain. My tours begin at West India Quay DLR station and finish at East India DLR station – Docklands Light Railway stations named after the docks that once thrived there. Sounding like a world tour, I use these points to emphasise how the naming of these places reflects the worldwide links that existed in this small part of London’s docklands and how this serves as reminder of the exploitation of people, land and resources that the Port of London and Britain as a whole built its vast wealth on.
The empty plinth of the 1813 statue of Robert Milligan (1746-1809) by sculptor Richard Westmacott in front of one of the sugar warehouses built by George Gwilt & Sons in 1802. Photographed by author, 2024.
Bringing groups alongside the original 1802 West India dock, people are struck by the sheer scale of the docks – impressive today and, one can only imagine, mindblowing to an early nineteenth century observer. Walking the vast facade of the two (of the original nine, stretching for half a mile) remaining sugar warehouses, built by George Gwilt & Sons to coincide with the opening of the first dock in 1802, enables people to see the scale of the sugar cargo that was being unloaded on the dockside. This, and the empty plinth of the Deputy Chairman of the West India company Robert Milligan’s statue, allows me to talk about the harsh realities of the links the trade in sugar and Milligan’s wealth had with the transatlantic slave trade.
Foundation stone, Hertsmere Road. Photographed by author, 2025.
Luckily, at West India dock, much remains to condemn our ancestors’ attitudes and the foundation of their wealth. The original foundation stone, laid in 1800, sits in a remaining part of the forbidding dock wall, resited here after war damage. Bringing groups in front of the huge foundation stone, allowing them to read the words describing the founding and building of the docks, describing,
AN UNDERTAKING
Which, under the favour of God, shall contribute
STABILITY, INCREASE and ORNAMENT
TO
BRITISH COMMERCE”
I draw attention to the language, particularly referencing ‘the favour of God’, sitting in stark contrast to the horrors on the plantations that brought this wealth to West India dock. As we continue to reassess Britain’s legacy with its colonial past, particularly the legacy of the slave trade on modern Britain, these remaining buildings and structures are a crucial reminder. As the Historic England listing of these warehouses describes, “the warehouses were built expressly to receive the products of slavery, and are the only surviving buildings of their kind in Britain to be linked to the slave trade in this direct and unambiguous way.”4 Standing next to these buildings, walking past them and experiencing their scale and ambition, brings this important message home far more than just reading about them.
Sources
A is for Architecture, ‘Sue Brownhill: Making London’s Docklands’, 13 November 2024
Ackroyd, Peter London: The Biography, (London: Chatto and Windus, 2000)
Brownhill, Sue and O’Hara, Glen, ‘From planning to opportunism? Re-examining the creation of the London Docklands Development Corporation’, Planning Perspectives, vol. 30, issue 4, (2015), pp. 537-570 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02665433.2014.989894
Coverley, Martin Psychogeography, ((Harpenden: Pocket Essentials, 2010)
Ford, Laura Grace Savage Messiah, (London: Verso, 2019)
Guy Debord, ‘Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography’ in Knabb, Ken (ed.) Situationist
International Anthology, (Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006), pp. 8-11
Historic England, ‘Warehouses and General Offices at Western end of North Quay’, https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1242440?section=official-list-entry
Porter, Stephen (ed), Survey of London, volume XLIII: Poplar, Blackwall and The Isle of Dogs, The Parish of All Saints, (London: The Athlone Press, 1994)
Sinclair, Iain, The Last London: True Fictions from an Unreal City (London: Oneworld Publications, 2017)
- Debord (2006), p.10.
- O’Hara and Brownhill (2015), p. 537.
- Brownhill (2024)
- Historic England, ‘Warehouses and General Offices at Western end of North Quay’, https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1242440?section=official-list-entry
