Between Corporate Diversity and the Closure of Queer Spaces: The Neoliberal Politics of Inclusion in East London

Located in east London in the borough of Tower Hamlets, Canary Wharf was turned into the city's second (and largest) financial district in 1987. The area is located on the shores of the river Thames on the West India Docks, a quay developed by the Scottish slaveowner Robert Milligan, who controlled the import of sugar, rum and coffee from the Caribbean into London at the turn of the 19th century. Canary Wharf takes its name not from its colonial past but from the site where, over a century later, fruit and vegetables coming from the Mediterranean and the Canary Islands were unloaded. While once a key commercial hub for Britain's colonial imports, the docklands came into gradual disuse and eventually closed in 1981, increasingly unable to accommodate larger vessels following the ‘containerization’ of the shipping industry. With it went the 25,000 jobs which sustained the cargo trade, leaving behind approximately 8 square miles of derelict land. After the docklands’ closure, the site became the target of an ambitious redevelopment project spearheaded by the Canadian property tycoon Paul Reichmann, owner of the property development company Olympia & York. Reichmann, who had secured investments to build the World Financial Centre in Manhattan just a few years earlier, received lenient tax breaks from the Thatcherite government to turn the docks into the city's new financial hub. While to this day the closure of the docklands is discussed as if it left behind ‘nothing but mirror-smooth basins, disturbed only by the occasional arc of a bird taking flight’, the area now commonly known as Canary Wharf was anything but empty. Its redevelopment was indeed accompanied by mass protests from the local community, including a funeral parade, a direct-action involving sheep that disrupted a redevelopment meeting, and a declaration of independence (Brooke, 2017). None of this mattered when Margaret Thatcher granted the London Dockland Development Corporation (LDDC) unlimited powers to develop, effectively taking control of the area out of the hands of the local government. Social housing was replaced by luxury apartments in shiny new skyscrapers, expensively out of reach of the local community. A new class of wealthy gentrifiers arrived, attracted to the possibility of lavish loft-living at a (relatively) affordable price.

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