ABSTRACT
One of the more peculiar contradictions of the English city of the 1980s is manifest in Canary Wharf. At the same time as English culture might be said to have reached the apogee of anti-urbanism, it engaged on the biggest urban construction project in Europe, a job that has only recently been exceeded in scale by the reconstruction of Berlin. My questions here are not so much how this immense piece of city came about (for that may be explained by the immense changes to the flows of capital at the same time) but rather how it could be imagined at a time when positive urban images were rare, when urban infrastructural and cultural projects were stalled or cancelled, and when cities themselves were shrinking. How could this vast extension to London be imaged? What images might it invoke to give it form? How, more generally, would it have to stage itself in order to assuage, or negotiate, English anxieties about the city?
