Global Markets and a Market Place: ReadingEastEndersas the Anti-Docklands

Abstract

To exit Canary Wharf tube station is to feel like being catapulted into a future world in the middle of East London. Wide paved spaces separate soaring glass skyscrapers. Fashionable new bars and restaurants bustle with office workers. The old docks have effectively become a giant water feature. One thing is for certain – this space does not feel like East London. According to popular myth, the eastern edge of the city should be backward, exotic and dangerous. Of course, some spaces to the east of the Tower of London could still be said to retain aspects of these characteristics. But standing in this specific part of the Isle of Dogs today it feels like East London has radically changed. For many, the 800ft tower at One Canada Square (Cesar Pelli & Associates 1991), popularly known as Canary Wharf, has become a totemic symbol of a new East London. In the short film Sundial (1992), William Raban shoots the tower from dozens of angles, making it appear like an uncanny obelisk transplanted from another world. What certainly becomes clear in Raban’s film is that the Docklands development has effectively sealed itself off from the many neglected spaces that surround it. Docklands, then, is a territory of ‘isolated, contained experiences, all of which (refer) to the safety of the interior: already, by definition, contained and enclosed’ (Shonfield 2000: 144). While Docklands apparently disregards its locality, it is undoubtedly located within the sphere of global capital. As such, the development exhibits many of the tensions that have come to exist between the specificities of contemporary urban spaces and the economic and socio-cultural processes of globalisation. Indeed, the

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 9 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.