Canary Wharf is a bit soulless, but it’s also quite far from everything. You really need to live close to the right transit lines to commute there easily. As a result, there is demand from expats who are posted there temporarily (a year or two) for flats in the area within walking distance.
Greenwich, to the south, is very nice, and accessible by DLR, but it’s a quite sleepy area. More appropriate for middle-aged CW workers with children than young ones.
Meanwhile there should be a lot of development soon. The “O2 peninsula” to the east is getting a lot of residential development, and the former Surrey Docks area (around Canada Water tube station) should be redeveloped soon. It was first developed in the 1980s, with predictable results (a big, auto-centric shopping mall, and suburban residential development which looks like something out of a ‘90s British sitcom set in the Midlands. As you’d expect, there is a lot of NIMBY backlash, but really the whole peninsula needs to be rebuilt.
Lastly, I think there is great potential to redevelop Whitechapel, Shadwell and Stepney over time. The part right along the river which hkskyline posted is full of historic warehouses, so those aren’t going anywhere, but there is a ton of quite ugly, low-rise, postwar building stock that could and should be redeveloped. One could increase density and create more housing (both market rate and council) along the DLR line between the City and Canary Wharf.
Eventually, that could create a skyline which stretched right from the City of London to Canary Wharf.
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There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge." - Isaac Asimov
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The juxtaposition of old and new.......
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