Thatcher-on-Thames

“It’s like a rollercoaster,” said one father, dumping three children in the front seats of the Docklands Light Railway. The driverless train that cuts through the former docks in East London will soon enter its fifth decade yet still, somehow, feels like the future. It is a better guide to the past.

A trip on the dlr is a tour through a corner of England that is forever Thatcherite. Stop at Shadwell and head down to the cobbled road of Pennington Street near Wapping. The Wapping dispute began in January 1986 when Rupert Murdoch thwarted the turbulent, technology-blocking print unions by moving his entire operation to the derelict warehouse district. A year of clashes between working journalists, pickets and policemen ensued. With Margaret Thatcher’s government in his corner, Mr Murdoch won. Britain’s union movement never recovered.

Wapping shares its anniversary with another Thatcherite achievement. The Big Bang, in which the cartel of the London Stock Exchange was broken, exploded four decades ago this year. Banks from America, France and Germany poured in. But where could they go? The City was too low-rise; Westminster too cramped; a spot off the m4 motorway too miserable.

Ride the dlr and the answer looms on the horizon. Canary Wharf, three stops on from Shadwell, is the heart of Docklands and a 130-acre monument to Thatcherite chutzpah. For two centuries London’s docks were the “hungry mouth” of the British empire, gobbling tobacco, citrus fruit and other exotic imports. By 1981 all the docks had shut. They left a deindustrialised canvas on which the Tories painted a vision of capitalism.

Its rebirth as a finance hub is one of Thatcher’s main achievements and the purest example of her ideology in action. It was predominantly funded by the private sector. Creating the London Docklands Development Corporation allowed builders to bypass normal planning rules; an enterprise zone let businesses that made their employees take the toy-train pay fewer taxes. The state’s main role was to get out of the way.

Not all were impressed. Dinky dlr trains were too small to ferry enough bankers to work. Docklands still has an unfair reputation as poorly connected, even though it now has three train lines. Likewise, the reviews of the architectural free-for-all were not good. “In their vulgarity and insensitivity in place and to each other, the buildings of the Enterprise Zone epitomise Thatcher’s Britain in all its philistinism and selfishness,” sniffed one critic.

Inside its flaws lurked virtues. A little selfishness can go a long way. Olympia & York, a developer, put in billions in the hope of making billions. This carried risk, but the state bore little of it. Olympia & York went bust; other investors stepped in. Government delays were a major cause of the bankruptcy, but there was no compensation. Counterparty risk always exists. The developer ate the losses just as it would have eaten the profit.

Philistinism has its uses, too. Recently regenerated areas of London, such as King’s Cross, were built delicately around their heritage. In Docklands history was bulldozed and replaced with the future. More history can always be made. The original Canary Wharf, a brick warehouse holding fruit from the Canary Islands, lasted only 43 years. Bankers have been on the site for almost as long. This single small area generates about £40bn ($54bn) in gross value added a year, or as much as Birmingham, Britain’s second city. Future historians can discuss that rather than fruit.

In 2026 Docklands is an unapologetic paean to the virtues of private ownership that Thatcher extolled. London City Airport sits a few short stops east on the dlr. It is the only one of London’s airports planned and paid for by the private sector alone. It is also the only civilised way of flying from the capital.

In Canary Wharf, a single owner means the mistakes made in the 1980s and 1990s have been undone: ugly buildings have been ripped down, neglected waterfronts turned into walkways; since the pandemic parks have been perked up and a theatre built. Contrast it with Oxford Street, supposedly Britain’s premier shopping street. On Oxford Street ownership is fractured, so no one cares enough to fix it. Each area is on opposite trajectories. Visits to Canary Wharf have risen by 50% since the pandemic to about 75m a year. Trips to Oxford Street have fallen by 40% in past two decades to 120m. Oxford Street is a commons. The results are tragic.

Another Thatcherite lesson lives on in Docklands: the private sector can often do a better job than the state even on fundamental matters. Canary Wharf claims its crime rate is about 90% lower than the average in London, where petty crimes such as phone-snatching have shot up even as crime overall has fallen. Forget Bobbies. In Canary Wharf, Big High Viz is on the beat.

Four decades on from the apogee of Thatcherism, Britain is a place where ambition is seen as vulgar or, worse, naff. Not in Docklands. Six of Britain’s ten tallest buildings sit here—of which five were completed after 2020. Of those, four are residential. About 3,500 people live on the Canary Wharf estate, a number likely to double in the next few years. The peninsula is home to the 75-storey Landmark Pinnacle, designed for people who want to live in Britain’s tallest residential building and who need not one but two superlatives. Think Dubai, without the weather. For some in Britain, this is hell. For others, it is close to heaven.

Docklands is, still, a Thatcherite wonderland. It is the product of a politics that was unapologetically pro-growth, pro-market and pro-capital; in favour of the future, rather than the past. It is in other words, a politics now almost entirely absent from Britain. It was a vision that the Conservatives embraced under Thatcher but have now spurned. If they do not stand for it, who will?■