Canary Wharf...BYO homing pigeon

Wednesday 8 August

I decided it was time to visit another tourist location nearby, so I ventured forth to Canary Wharf. Canary Wharf is a relatively new business estate (first tenants moved there in 1991) in South East London which boasts the tallest building in Britain - One Canada Square - which is 50 floors (244 metres) high.

As with most things here, it has a long and interesting history. Briefly though, in medieval times the area was a marsh, which was drained in the 13th Century to provide land for pastures and cornfields. By the late 1500s it had become a shipping dock, and was named Canary Wharf because many of the imports were from the Canary Islands.

Canary Wharf is planned on a grand scale...a little like a high-rise Canberra meets The Matrix. The estate extends to over 97 acres and has approximately 14.1 million square feet of office and retail space over 24 office buildings and 5 retail malls with 80,000 people working here.

However, with all that planning, I still managed to get lost. Well not lost per se, more like I was able to find the same place 3 times, 3 different ways. The shopping malls are underground, and I spent a while browsing through some of the shops...but in the end managed to spend more time trying to work out how to get to the other shopping mall in the next building, unsuccessfully. I ended up outside, over the bridge, in the residential complex...completely the wrong direction.

The highlight of this part of the trip (let's focus on the positives after all) was seeing my first mullet hairstyle outside of Australia. Some poor Eastern European kid of 4 or 5 was sporting this horrendous do, and I felt it was my social duty to take his parents aside and whisper in their ears. Unfortunately, the opportunity for the frank and open discussion about the effect of this hairstyle on the young whipper snappers emotional development didn't arise.

Eventually I did manage to find my way to a different mall, but my enthusiasm had waned rather dramatically by that point, so after a quick perusal, I tottered off to find my way back to the underground station. I somehow managed to end up on street level in my search for the underground, so surely this futuristic mini-city could do with a suggestion box where I can put my 5p opinion about it being more of a rabbit warren than a meticulously planned estate.