✉ It's half past eight on a Wednesday morning and Canary Wharf is oddly quiet. Nobody is pouring out of the main tube station entrance and only two people are wandering in. The financial work of the nation is still being completed but most of the workers are elsewhere, one computer screen being much like another. A pigeon struts across the piazza watched by a security guard dressed in police-like uniform. It's not this empty everywhere - several people are heading to their desks out of shot, one in a smart but bulging tweed suit only a banker could get away with. But the buzz is missing, the cluster of bars and streetfood is at much reduced levels and the highrise landscape has never looked less necessary.
✉ Jubilee Park covers the roof of the tube station (because they couldn't plant a skyscraper here). Its water feature is a rocky chain of burbling pools, its trees are Metasequoias and its grass is better tended than most. It's also an ideal place to sit and open up your phone, or eat lunch, or socialise, except perhaps not this early in the morning or in such miserable weather. To aid social distancing a scattering of white circles have been painted on the grass, indeed a workman is busy with a giant squirty can as I walk past, topping up the faded lines ready for this week's clientele. Here too are tall bronze sculptures by Helaine Blumenfeld, part of an delightful exhibition across the estate with the misfortune to launch in mid-March. Thankfully someone with an eye on cultural economy has rescheduled the closing date from 26th June to 31st January, which might give a few more absent employees a chance to enjoy.
✉ The South Dock footbridge was not designed for easy flow, especially at the northern end where access is via a short set of confined steps. The South Dock wasn't designed for easy access either, this footbridge being the only pedestrian route across the water for three quarters of a mile. In my repeated perambulations around Docklands I've become increasingly frustrated by the way Canary Wharf is divided into discrete parallel slices, with only the DLR and subterranean shopping malls cutting through... shortcuts you now require a face covering to negotiate.
✉ Beneath the belly of Heron Quays station a plaque commemorates the landing in 1982 of a Dash 7 turboprop aeroplane. There were no office buildings here at the time, only a long narrow strip of former quayside where three warehouses had once stood. Brymon Airways believed there was money to be made by constructing an airport in the Royal Docks, so decided to demonstrate the feasibility of a Short Take Off and Land-ing strip by using this vacant site in Docklands. They came back and proved it again the following year in front of the planning inspector. By the end of the decade City Airport was operational, and the site of the touchdown had become home to a DLR station and high finance instead. Ian Visits and Isle of Dogs Life have the full story.
✉ Did you know Canary Wharf has its own crazy golf course? It moves around a bit, consisting as it does of nine portable holes, and was last seen in Montgomery Square opposite the Jubilee line's other entrance. This summer it's to be found in Bank Street Park, a most peculiar square draped with astroturf and sandwiched between hoardings and noisy worksites. Playing golf is free, but clubs and balls are only provided if you turn up between noon and six between Thursday and Sunday. The course includes loops, leaps, humps and seesaws, and to keep the queue moving the rules permit a maximum of 7 shots per hole. But the minigolf and indeed the park are only temporary, laid out across the footprint of a planned 165m-high tower called Ten Bank Street. Crazy.
✉ Here's a most unexpected sight in the pavement at the junction of Westferry Road and Cuba Street - a plaque claiming that Millwall FC was founded here... in a jam factory. Part of the unexpectedness is explained by this part of the Isle of Dogs actually being called Millwall. The club kept the name when they crossed the river in 1910, in much the same way as (Woolwich) Arsenal kept theirs in 1913 when crossing the other way. But jam?! It turns out that Morton's were a Scottish company who specialised in providing canned goods for sailing ships, and who opened their first English factory beside the West India Docks in 1870. Jam was but one of many products manufactured here, but sounds better than calling this a canned fish factory, soup factory or potted meat factory. The employees naturally fancied playing football and founded Millwall Rovers over a pint in a pub in Tooke Street in 1885. Today the factory site is occupied by a cluster of flats, although the Tesco underneath the nearest block does still sell canned fish, soup, potted meat... and jam.
✉ My southwestward stroll has finally brought me to the river... where we find the disused shell of West India Pier. There's been a pier at the end of Cuba Street since 1875, originally for the convenience of wool merchants sailing to the docks from the City. In 1905 the pier became a disembarkation point for Penny Steamers, the LCC's (unsuccessful) flat fare riverboat service. The Luftwaffe took out the original in 1941, but the pier was rebuilt in this pleasing Fifties style for the Festival of Britain (as the river bus drop-off for visitors to the Lansbury Estate). Riverbuses returned in 1987 to aid the opening of Canary Wharf, but these days Thames Clippers leave from a bespoke pier closer to the financial action. West India Pier has been partly rejuvenated since but its new owner keeps it very much locked and regrettably private.
