George Iacobescu: The man who made Canary Wharf

The first time he saw the Isle of Dogs, Sir George Iacobescu was less than impressed. It was late 1986, and the young civil engineer had been sent by his Canadian employers to assess the suitability of London’s barren Docklands as a plot on which to develop a new financial centre. He sent a memo back to his superiors in Toronto. Its one-line message was unequivocal: “Don’t touch it.”

Looking down over the area now known as Canary Wharf from the 30th floor of One Canada Square almost four decades later, Sir George, now the chairman of the Canary Wharf Group, offers no suggestion his initial instincts were wrong.

“When I looked at the site, I saw there was no way to get here,” he says. “The Limehouse Link tunnel didn’t exist, the Jubilee Line didn’t exist, Crossrail didn’t exist, the DLR was built but it didn’t work. I walked here from Grosvenor Square. As a construction man my first thought was, ‘how do you build here?’

Even with state-of-the-art transport links, the Canary Wharf project would have been considered wildly ambitious. “The first design of Canary Wharf was about 10 million square feet, huge by the standards of the time,” says Sir George, adding that today the total developed area is double this.

“To build 10 million square feet, you need roughly 10,000 people. So the first thought was, ‘how do you get materials here?’ And then, ‘how do you bring people to work?’”

Before him lay a post-industrial wasteland, with little sign of life beyond a few sheds and the edgy Limehouse Studios, where much of Channel 4’s early content had been filmed. In the 1960s, the docks had fallen silent after more than two centuries of frenetic activity, rendered obsolete by Britain’s dwindling manufacturing industry, and by the evolution of container transport, which required completely different infrastructure. Sir George remembers that as well as being cut off, the site had no electricity, water or gas. “So how the hell do you develop it?” he says again.

The construction brief may have been flawed, but the momentum behind it appeared to have legs. In October 1986, Margaret Thatcher’s government had deregulated the UK’s financial sector, creating a unique – and highly appealing – market overnight. “It was genius,” says Sir George. “I know that genius had a negative impact in 2008, but it created the strength of London as the new financial capital of the world.” In the sector this period of rapid deregulation, and the startling growth it kickstarted, would go down in banking history as ‘The Big Bang’.

Now, Thatcher wanted a gleaming new landmark that would symbolise London’s aspirant banking culture and help put it on the global financial map. She called Sir George’s boss, Paul Reichmann, the owner of the Canadian private developer, Olympia & York, and invited him to take on the project. Reichmann, like many others, fell promptly under The Iron Lady’s spell.

Back in Canada, Olympia & York saw Sir George’s memo and ignored it. “My opinion had no value,” he quips. At the time, Reichmann’s company was the largest private developer in the world. It had built New York’s World Financial Center and had a vast Manhattan property portfolio. The opportunity to build London its own world-beating financial centre, at the behest of the country’s iconoclastic prime minister, was too good to turn down.

But none of this solved any of the problems with the Isle of Dogs identified by Sir George. He remembers Thatcher’s promise to Reichmann: “‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘Everything you need, you’ll get. We’ll extend the Jubilee Line and before you come out of the ground, it will be running.’ Famous last words,” he says.

That George Iacobescu was even in London in 1986 was itself nothing short of  remarkable. Born and educated in socialist Romania, he had emigrated to Canada in 1975 after he was “sold” by the authorities to an aunt who lived in Montréal for US$5,000. “I left legally, so I didn’t escape,” says Sir George. “But I escaped in a moral way.”

A fish out of water, he went to a party one Saturday that would change his life. “I was lucky enough not to know anybody there,” he remembers. “I met a gentleman on the steps of the house and we talked about construction all night. On Monday, I got an offer to be the assistant to the executive vice president of his company.”

That company was Olympia & York, which by then had built First Canadian Place, a 300-metre skyscraper in Toronto that remains Canada’s tallest building. Unsurprisingly, smart-thinking and hard-working as he was, Sir George rose quickly through the ranks, and by 1988 had joined the London Docklands’ regeneration team as a senior vice president of construction.

He wasn’t the only one landing in the British capital at the time. “Suddenly the world’s banks flocked to London to try this new elixir,” he says. “But there was no infrastructure and no development.”

Olympia & York surveyed the City of London and found it was woefully unsuited to the demands of this burgeoning new era. “We discovered that 85 per cent of the buildings there did not have the technology,” says Sir George. “They had no power, they had no communication, they had no air conditioning and no floor plates. That created the need for Canary Wharf.” Olympia & York accepted Mrs Thatcher’s invitation, and took it on.

The vision was the stuff of science fiction – and targeted squarely at the financial sector. Towering buildings would service the new high-speed digital age with dual power sources and state-of-the-art communications infrastructure, all buried with waste and drainage outlets in eight-metre deep concrete boxes installed under new roads, future-proofing them for hundreds of years. Building floorplates would be almost 30,000 square feet, roughly six times greater than the NatWest Tower, the City’s totem at the time.

The final flourish was that rents would be half what was on offer in the Square Mile, London’s historic commercial centre, just four miles away. “That was what the financial services industry needed,” says Sir George. “And this was a new product for that industry.”

Construction began in 1988. With no roads and no rail, 90 per cent of the first phase of Canary Wharf – 4.5 million square feet – was built by bringing the thousands of tonnes of material needed in by barge from Tilbury, something that had never been done before. Meanwhile, the construction workers were bussed as close as possible to the site and then walked in the rest of the way, as there were no roads. Concrete, sheet metal and rebar plants were built on-site to speed up building. One thousand uniform trees were shipped over from Germany for landscaping. And up sprang Canary Wharf.

On 26 August 1991, His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh opened One Canada Square, a gleaming stainless steel monolith with a pyramid-shaped tip, London’s new tallest building. In phase one, Olympia & York had overseen the construction of 4.5 million square feet and spent £2.5bn, one billion of it on infrastructure. The scale of the achievement still hasn’t left Sir George. “The first thing you learn at university is that if you want to develop something, first you do the roads and the transport,” he says. “Then the development comes around it. Here it was the other way round.”

But the timing was terrible. By late 1991, the UK had entered a recession, and the global economy was in turmoil. In 1985, Sir George remembers, London office vacancy had been at three per cent. Come 1991, the figure was 20 per cent. Canary Wharf also had competition. Seeing its potential to lure talent and money away from the Square Mile, the City of London had opened its doors to developers, too. London’s traditional, conservative financial services sector was not in the mood to move, particularly not to the Isle of Dogs.

Moreover, there was still no way to get there. The Limehouse Link wouldn’t open until 1993 (“two months ahead of schedule and three years too late,” says Sir George), the same year the DLR finally became operational. Thatcher’s Jubilee Line extension, promised in 1986, was finished in December 1999. In 1992, with One Canada Square empty, Olympia & York went bust.

Thirty years on, Canary Wharf’s initial failure belongs to another age. Now, it’s a global financial powerhouse, home to thousands, and a destination for around 49 million visitors a year.

What happened? “If you want to know the history of Canary Wharf, it’s the history of transport,” says Sir George. “Canary Wharf equals infrastructure and transport.” The upturn began in 1995 when an international consortium, seeing links to the site improving, acquired what had become Canary Wharf Limited, and appointed Paul Reichmann as chairman. In 1997, Sir George was appointed CEO, and then Chairman and CEO in 2011, his title today.

His pride at what he and what is now known as Canary Wharf Group have realised is tangible. “When we started, everybody was worried Frankfurt would take over London,” he says. “Today, Canary Wharf is 50 per cent bigger than the financial centre of Frankfurt. Just Canary Wharf, not including the City of London.

“He’s keen to impress that Canary Wharf is more than just a banker’s paradise. In recent years, residential towers have been built to accommodate a new generation drawn to Canary Wharf’s clean streets, buzzy atmosphere and entrepreneurial culture. Sir George says around 4,000 people now call it home, lured by new developments like Wood Wharf, and that around 70 per cent of the 120,000 people who worked on the site pre-pandemic have already returned. The disaster of the early 1990s is long forgotten.

“People are discovering that there is a lot more than banking here,” says Sir George. “Canary Wharf is becoming a hub for people to come and have a nice life, as opposed to just coming to work.”

He says there are now more than 300 shops and restaurants in Canary Wharf, as well as four health clubs (including the largest in the capital) and 20 acres of outdoor space. The site hosts 200 cultural events every year. Canary Wharf’s Waitrose is the retailer’s number one UK outlet, he insists, describing the area as a “15-minute city”, where everything a resident needs can be reached on foot in a quarter of an hour or less. “It takes 30 years to become an overnight success,” he says. “I think we’re past that point.

“As the group looks to expand the site, it faces new challenges. “Brexit has damaged the [construction] industry, no question,” says Sir George, lamenting the spike in the price of raw materials and the loss of labour since the 2016 referendum. He sees the current government’s levelling-up agenda as a threat, too. “If you don’t help London to grow and bring it to the same level as the rest of the world’s capitals, you’re levelling down,” he says.

Sustainability is a major challenge, too, but one he says Canary Wharf is meeting, having accelerated its green agenda five years ago. “We will hit net zero much sooner than 2050, probably 2030,” he says, confirming there will be no carbon off-setting involved.

A new “greening” initiative led by Shobi Khan, his successor as Chief Executive, and supported by the Eden Project, is a flagship, while the group is funding the refurbishment of older buildings, such as One Canada Square to make them more sustainable. “It’s much easier and cheaper to make an old building sustainable than to make a brand new sustainable building,” Sir George says, citing the regulations now attached to the supply chain.

But what about the future? Working from home and the prospect of a four-day week appear not to have diminished Sir George’s optimism. He recalls conversations led by the group more than 20 years ago that catalysed the Elizabeth Line. “Crossrail acts like an elastic,” he says. “Either it pulls the City towards Canary Wharf, or vice versa. Canary Wharf will thrive. In time, close your eyes, and Canary Wharf and the City will be one connected piece.

“Looking back, he’s under no illusions as to what Canary Wharf has done for London. “People understand that Canary Wharf, the City and the Square Mile created the power of London,” he says. “But without Canary Wharf? Even the City of London says Canary Wharf was the release valve that helped us over all the other cities.

“Today, Canary Wharf is a base for the world’s largest banks, including Credit Suisse, Barclays, HSBC, JP Morgan, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, BNY Mellon and Northern Trust. “With the exception of Goldman Sachs and UBS, they’re all here.”

“When we started,” Sir George continues, “Canary Wharf was something completely different to what existed. Look at the Square Mile. Today it looks just like Canary Wharf. It’s not Canary Wharf that imitated the Square Mile. It isn’t a servile imitation, it’s a creative imitation. But it’s an imitation.” He sees the two as being “in friendly competition” – two sides of the same coin.

That said, he has little time for the priapic obsession with tall buildings, insisting there are no plans to regain the title of the UK’s tallest building, held by One Canada Square until 2012, when it was overtaken by The Shard. “You have to create buildings so people can work and live and have a pleasant life,” he says. “Architecture for the purpose of architecture doesn’t stand the test of time.

“Now 76 years old and a British citizen, the first Romanian-born businessman to become a Knight of the Realm shows no signs of stopping. “Success is hard work and there is no shortcut,” he says. He does two days a week as Canary Wharf Group’s chairman, devoting much of the rest of his time to charitable projects, such as sitting on the advisory board of Chelsea and Westminster Hospital and on the board of trustees of the Royal College of Music. “Retirement is overrated,” he says, a broad smile spreading across his face.

Robin Swithinbank is a contributor to the New York Times, GQ and the Financial Times, and is former editor of The Jackal