Best Restaurants, Bars and Things to Do in Canary Wharf, London

About Canary Wharf

Canary Wharf is better for eating and drinking than most people who have never worked there would expect. The concentration of high-spending professionals working in the towers has attracted serious restaurant operators over the years, and some of the group restaurant openings that anchor the malls are among the stronger outposts of their respective operators. The independent scene has grown more recently, particularly in the Wood Wharf development to the east, where a more varied mix of food and drink businesses has arrived alongside the new residential population.

The waterside setting is a genuine asset. The dock edges around Canary Wharf, West India Quay and South Dock provide outdoor terrace settings that are hard to match elsewhere in London, and in good weather the area becomes one of the more pleasant places in the city to eat and drink outside. The Crossrail Place rooftop, with its unusual planted glass canopy and the restaurants beneath it, adds a different kind of destination that works year-round.

Lets Discover creators who cover Canary Wharf tend to work in or visit the area regularly and know which of the options are worth choosing over the others — a useful distinction in a neighbourhood where the gap between the best and the adequate can be significant.

The Canary Wharf estate's three main retail areas — Canada Place, Cabot Place and Jubilee Place — each contain clusters of restaurants ranging from reliable group operations to the occasional independent worth knowing. Crossrail Place, the development above the Elizabeth line station, has the most architecturally interesting setting and some of the area's stronger restaurant options on both the ground floor and the rooftop. West India Quay, across the water from the main estate, has a run of waterside restaurants in the converted Georgian dock warehouses that are among the better settings in east London for a longer meal. The Wood Wharf district to the east of the main estate is newer and more mixed in character, with independents arriving alongside the residential development. South Quay Plaza and the streets around Heron Quays have a quieter character with venues that cater primarily to the residential and business population.

History and culture in Canary Wharf

The land that Canary Wharf now occupies was for centuries at the centre of London's global trade. The West India Docks, opened in 1802 as the world's first enclosed commercial dock system, were purpose-built to handle the rum, sugar and hardwood arriving from the Caribbean colonies. At their peak in the Victorian era, the docks employed tens of thousands of workers and were the engine of an empire's commerce. The docks declined through the 20th century as container shipping rendered their infrastructure obsolete, and the last commercial cargo was handled in 1980. The redevelopment of the Docklands from the mid-1980s, led by the London Docklands Development Corporation under the Thatcher government, transformed the derelict docklands into one of Europe's largest financial centres in under a decade. The first towers were completed at Canary Wharf in the early 1990s, and One Canada Square — at 235 metres the tallest building in the UK for much of the 1990s — became an instantly recognisable part of London's skyline.