The dilemma facing Canary Wharf’s 8 Canada Square is one facing many monocultural business districts across the West. In a post-pandemic world where the need for vast corporate HQs has receded, what do we do with the office buildings left behind?

8 Canada Square embodies the premium end of the problem. Designed by globally renowned British architect Norman Foster, when it opened in 2002 it was the second tallest building in Britain (it’s now the 13th) and was to become the first building in Britain to be sold for over £1bn. Housing 8,000 HSBC employees in a vertical corporate village that boasted dedicated staff facilities such as health spas and medical suites, the 200m-tall curved-edge skyscraper was once hailed as the cutting-edge future of office design. 

Fast-forward barely two decades (and one pandemic) later and HSBC now plans to relocate to much smaller premises in the City of London by 2027 leaving what could become potentially Britain’s tallest white elephant without its sole tenant. Demolition is not really a realistic, environmental or ethically sustainable option. Not only is the building younger than the first commercial camera phone but as one of a symmetrical pair of skyscrapers on either side of the Canary Wharf Tower, its removal would leave the centrepiece of Canary Wharf’s distinctive skyline ludicrously disjointed.

 So owners the Qatar Investment Authority and its developer subsidiary Canary Wharf Group have hit upon another even more radical idea; cutting away huge chunks of the tower to introduce planted, multi-level terraces and viewing galleries that can serve its new incarnation as a leisure hub and tourist destination complete with restaurants, theatres, hotels and shops.

 The plans are certainly innovative and ambitious, but are they realistic? While clearly not impossible, hacking out huge sections of a building of this scale and composition will not only be a tortuous structural challenge but a sensationally expensive one too. Experts have estimated costs of up to 1bn U.S. dollars, a figure that, as is the case with large-scale projects of this kind, will almost inevitably (exponentially) expand.

In design terms, too the charge of architectural gimmickry looms large. The visualisations are conceptual at this stage, but they appear to show a brightly-coloured Willy Wonka-esque lunarscape of rooftop terraces and infinity pools rammed into what, (despite its extreme cosmetic surgery), still to all intents and purposes resembles an awkwardly apologetic, architecturally misgendered 45-storey office block. One might call it busy, but one would barely call it beautiful.

But the loudest alarm bells ring around use. With 1.1m ft2 of premium commercial floorplate, the tower offers the same amount of Grade A office space as the entire city of Manchester. But in a capital city already full of leisure attractions and high-level viewing galleries, is it not both unreasonable and impractical to allocate this colossal amount of space to contrived versions of these amenities in a district the public still overwhelmingly associates with corporate rather than tourist activities? 

The plans should instead embrace the only viable refurbishment solution for a building this size in London in 2024: a mixed-use redevelopment that prioritises residential units. As I argued in Policy Exchange’s recent Tall Buildings paper, London desperately needs a strategic tall buildings policy which provides a clear framework for the future development of high-rises in the capital and which stresses that residential towers can make a meaningful contribution to solving the housing crisis when they are part of a broader, mid-rise densification strategy.

Equally, well-designed and sensitively-located skyscrapers can be exhilarating urban stimulants and can also have a positive role to play in established high-rise districts that pose no new threat to heritage assets or historic character. While there are plenty of areas in the capital to which these proscriptions apply, (or at least should do) Canary Wharf is no longer one of them.

While residential conversions of non-residential buildings can play a substantial role in easing the housing crisis, their recent history is controversial due to the expansion of permitted development right, a move which some believe jeopardises the quality of new housing. However, through the use of mechanisms like the National Planning Policy Framework, the government should be encouraging conversions of this kind as long as they meet quality standards. This potentially includes compelling owners, in appropriate circumstances, to consider residential conversions in the first instance, a mandate that would instantly prioritise increased housing supply.

A residential conversion of 8 Canada Square would doubtless face profound architectural challenges. Unlike the recent conversion into flats of London’s famous Centre Point Tower, the deep floorplates here are too big to lend themselves to seamless residential reappropriation. And because natural light will have too far a distance to travel to reach the centre of the building from the windows, this will severely restrict the potential placement of habitable rooms (which are significantly smaller than open-plan offices) anywhere other than along the perimeter of the building.

… it will also act as a totemic figurehead to redundant office buildings everywhere that good design can transform even corporations into communities

But there are a range of innovative design solutions to address these problems. The use of lightwells at upper levels could be one as well as the installation of winter gardens or residential terraces along the edge of the building to suck daylight deeper into the interior and provide vital amenity space. This in turn might generate a more authentic reconfiguration of the tower’s external façade than has currently been achieved with the arbitrary Jenga-block excavations.

A residential conversion would also tally perfectly with Canary Wharf Group’s own worthy ambition to diversify Canary Wharf’s original monocultural commercial offer with a new, mixed-use generation of buildings providing homes, shops, attractions and recreation. When Canary Wharf’s first tenants moved in in 1991 it didn’t have a single housing unit. By the time its latest phase of development is complete in 2030, it will have 3,500.

Converting a significant portion of the district’s second tallest building into flats, complete with affordable as well as high-end units, will prove to the outside world that Canary Wharf is open to people as well as business. But crucially, it will also act as a totemic figurehead to redundant office buildings everywhere that good design can transform even corporations into communities.