Canary Wharf’s pivot looks like a tall order – Reuters

Canary Wharf’s pivot looks like a tall order – Reuters

LONDON, July 3 (Reuters Breakingviews) - Canary Wharf may be in trouble once again. London’s Docklands hub last week received a body blow with the news that $157 billion bank HSBC (HSBA.L), was turning its back on 8 Canada Square, its home for two decades, in favour of a smaller central-London building. It may mark the start of the fourth mid-decade upheaval in the estate’s 40-year history.

The east-London financial district, named for the quay where ships from the Canary Islands once unloaded, has had plenty of strife in its short life. After original developer Paul Reichmann’s Olympia & York went bust in 1992, the Canadian entrepreneur in 1995 assembled Saudi Arabian and U.S. investors to buy it from creditor banks. The new Canary Wharf Group lured giants like Barclays (BARC.L), but hit the skids in a property correction in the early noughties, and was subsequently acquired through a 2004 leveraged buyout by a Morgan Stanley (MS.N) consortium. The debt from that deal proved problematic for the newly renamed Songbird Estates after the 2008 financial crisis, which prompted another sale to Brookfield Property Partners (BPYPN.O) and the Qatar Investment Authority in 2015.