Negar Mansouri
In January 2025, The Guardian published an essay on ‘the office-to-home conversions’ reshaping the landscape of the world’s most global financial district: Canary Wharf. One year on, in 2026, the number of residents—many of whom do not work in the Wharf—has risen from around 3,500 to 5,000 and more. This marks a break in the drastic socio-material changes made to the Wharf starting in the 1980s and 190s to turn the area into ‘a depopulated blank slate’ for the creation of a banking and financial district (at 281).
Yet, just as the development of West India Quay at the turn of the 19th century materialized in the broader context of the rising commodity capitalism in Imperial Britain, and the transformation of Canary Wharf into a second City of London in the last quarter of the 20th century sought to restore the profitability rate to Anglo-American capital and pave the way for the rise of Global Britain, the recent restructuring of the wharf to a create a mixed-use neighborhood has also been linked to the difficulty of increasing productivity in the finance sector, the decentering of the sector in the face of rising ‘productivism’ in the advanced capitalist core, and ultimately, global industrial overcapacity.
Needless to say, parliamentary acts, government orders, and court rulings have been central to the making and remaking of Canary Wharf over the centuries, in line with the dominant mode of accumulation in each era. Yet, as my article, titled ‘The Enclosure of London’s Canary Wharf: The Intertwined Lives of Local and Global Production Relations (Vol. 53, Issue 4, 2026), argues, these laws should not be viewed as the product of pure political choices, for they are intertwined with the changing position of Britain in the global economic order and its relations with the developing world, but also the internal contradictions of capitalism, including the tendency of the profit rate to fall.
Law, space, and the profitability crisis
Marxist and critical legal scholars have historically centered on ‘private property’ and ‘the role of law in the enclosure of public space’ for that purpose. The dominant understanding is that by facilitating exclusive property rights in the enclosed space, the ‘law’ essentially freezes social relations, ending previous rights and creating permanence and stability. The trajectory of Canary Wharf, however, demonstrates a long history of successive regimes of accumulation emerging from the internal contradictions of capitalism and speculative investments.
As such, we can view the interplay between law and capitalism’s own laws of motion in the making of space as follows: previously shared spaces are closed to generate surplus value. However, once the surplus value from the new investment falls, either due to market competition or a lack of sufficient information regarding future consumption or returns, the space has to be restructured again through law without undermining the private property relations that underpin it.
The rise of Global Britain and the remaking of Canary Wharf
The series of West India Docks—the origin of today’s Canary Wharf—were built in the early 1800s at the initiative of several British merchants and slave traders in reaction to the growing theft and delays in London’s unorganized wharves. Their creation also embodied a move from mercantile to industrial Britain and the need for rationally organized marine transport. The growing specialization of wharves in the loading and unloading of specific commodities throughout the 19th century and the shifting demographics of the dock labor and the Isle of Dogs also manifested the rise of an advanced and efficient global economic system under the aegis of the British Empire, which only took force in the aftermath of Napoleon and the dismantling of the continental system by Imperial Britain. By the end of the 19th century, mainland Europe received 85 percent of British exports and re-exports, mostly through the Docklands, which generated around 70 percent of England’s capital.
Nevertheless, the two World Wars, the economic mailaise of the British economy in the late 1940s and the 1950s, but also the internal contradictions of the Bretton Woods system—i.e., welfarism at home and free competition in international trade—defeated Britain in its own game. The S.S. Fairland, the US-owned container vessel, skipping London Docklands on its first transatlantic voyage in 1966, became a symbolic manifestation of Britain’s global decline.
On the eve of the arrival of the neo-conservatives in the government and Parliament in 1979, the creation of the London Docklands Development Corporation by the Local Government, Planning and Land Act of 1980 and the sale of Canary Wharf to the Canadian real estate giant Olympia & York five years later were intended to ‘reclaim territory for freedom’, to use Margaret Thatcher’s words. The idea was to restructure the Wharf for a new wave of finance capitalism, beyond what the traditional City of London could offer to a changing global economic order, in a broader transition from Imperial to Global Britain. In practice, the transformations of the Wharf laid the groundwork for new, asymmetric developments in the national and global economies as developing countries including Britain’s former colonies protectorares underwent their own capitalist industrialization and began using London banks and financial institutions as a ‘safe box.
The downturn of finance and the repurposing of Canary Wharf
Despite the promises of ‘trickling down, the rise of British finance and adjacent services, mostly serving foreign and multinational firms, has failed to drastically change the economic landscape of Britain. London has come to house an overwhelming concentration of economic and political power, undermining other former economic hubs in Britain. British finance has been experiencing a slowdown faster than that of other Group of Seven countries since the 2008 crisis, and more sharply following Brexit. Finance itself has proven to be inelastic when it comes to productivity growth and maintaining the profit rate. This, coupled with the changing world of work that Covid-19 brought to Canary Wharf, has resulted in a pause in in-pipeline construction projects and a decline in external private investment, before the recent strategic decisions were made to diversify businesses in the wharf and turn some of the offices into residences. This has, of course, necessitated the relaxing of the planning rules on part of the government, paralleling recent reforms made by the Bank of England to banking supervision standards that came into being in response to the 2007-2009 financial crisis. Prioritizing economic growth over risk management, these reforms embody what British historian David Edgerton has recently called ‘Anglo-futurism’ or the British state’s ‘fantasies of world leadership and renewal through deregulation’.