Gotham City-on-Thames

click photo to enlarge
When I drive into London down the M11 from the north, my first glimpse of the capital is the cluster of towers at Canary Wharf. As I get closer, off to the right, the tall buildings of the City and the London Eye start to compete for attention. But, my destination being the south bank of the Thames upstream from Canary Wharf, it is this landmark, and particularly the pyramid-topped Canary Wharf Tower (One Canada Square), that acts like a lighthouse guiding me on to the A13, the north bank and the Rotherhithe Tunnel.

Canary Wharf is London's financial district. Ken Allison, in his book London's Contenporary Architecture +, describes it as an "instant Gotham City", and with good reason. Not only has it appeared in a relatively short time, but the overall planning for this area of derelict docks was by Skidmore, Owens and Merrill (SOM), the Chicago-based architectural firm who were responsible for some of the iconic towers of the C20. They also designed several of the lower buildings in the development in a Post-Modern and post-Post-Modern style. However, it is the cluster of tall structures, in particular Canary Wharf Tower, HSBC, and Citigroup that give the place a metropolitan character that is much more of the U.S. than England. The architects of these three buildings - Cesar Pelli and Norman Foster - have produced sleek, but quite bland emblems of global capitalism that impress more in a group than individually.

In fact, at night, or when low cloud wreaths their tops, or when sun burns off early morning fog as in my image, the buildings have a brooding quality that brings to mind some of the more recent Batman films. But, a bright, clear, sunny day reveals them as just another set of opulent, shiny boxes. My photograph was taken last autumn, and is one I overlooked at the time. The indistinct quality of the image, the fog and mist (partly of the buildings' own making), and the way the early sun was falling, has made a photograph that seems to have more than a hint of the Gotham City-on-Thames alluded to by Ken Allinson.

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 50mm (100mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/640 seconds
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation: -1.0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Canary Wharf thoughts

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The fog that enveloped London early yesterday morning was the precursor to a beautiful, uplifting, sunny day with an unseasonal maximum temperature of 23° Celsius. But, as I walked along the south bank of the river at Rotherhithe, and the towers of Canary Wharf loomed up out of the mist, my mind was filled with darker thoughts. Along with the City of London, these buildings are the country's financial powerhouse - Citicorp, HSBC, Barclays, Lehman Brothers and others have their headquarters at Canary Wharf. Looking at them I couldn't help but see the fog that surrounded the towers, a fog that had swept in and enveloped them, but also was of their own making from their heating plants, as a metaphor for the financial turmoil that surrounds and penetrates most of these institutions.

However, my mind only allowed these thoughts to last for a moment, because the way the sunlight was falling on the buildings, turning them into amorphous masses, casting deep shadows that contrasted with the illuminated particles of water that filled the air, caused the name Hugh Ferris to surface in my consciousness. Among American architectural draughtsmen of the twentieth century Hugh Ferris (1889-1962) stands supreme. His charcoal, pencil and crayon perspectives of imagined and actual skyscrapers created romantic, almost Piranesian views, featuring towering mass, deep shadows, converging verticals, and the multiple step-backs of the early buildings. Ferris clearly saw drama, poetry and a vision of the future in the skyscrapers that were springing up in New York and Chicago.

Had the morning been clear and sunny I'd have looked at Canary Wharf and seen the buildings of organizations that once revelled in their omnipotence and omniscience but now crave state hand-outs. But the fog and the light allowed me to forget the troubles of the world for a while, and see it through the eyes of a visionary draughtsman. For that I was grateful.

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 24mm (48mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/2500
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation: -1.7 EV
Image Stabilisation: On