The CEO who put Canary Wharf back on the map

“Everybody wrote this place off,” Shobi Khan says as he walks a visitor around Canary Wharf, the 130-acre estate he has overseen since 2019. After the UK’s banker-scaring vote to leave the European Union, and an office-emptying pandemic, the refrain he kept hearing was: “It’s over. Bad experiment. Why did we do that?”

Khan still remembers his fury when a rival London property developer wrote in 2024 that Canary Wharf needed “a drastic transformation” to survive, but those doubts were widely shared at the time. Just when the east London business district might have been celebrating a post-COVID rebound, it lost a series of prominent tenants, including HSBC, Moody’s, and Clifford Chance.

Fast forward to 2026, and Canary Wharf Group is reporting the highest rental rates in its history. Office occupancy now exceeds 92%, local retailers’ sales are 40% higher than they were in 2019, and visitor numbers, which fell from 54 million a year to just 20 million during the pandemic, are on track to exceed last year’s record of 76 million.

Khan can also boast a string of new commitments from high-profile global tenants. Visa recently leased 300,000 square feet of office space, Barclays just bought its headquarters for £750 million, and Citi is investing more than $1 billion in its European HQ. Capping them all is JPMorgan’s proposal to erect a £3 billion, 265-meter tower that will be London’s largest office building if its plans are approved. “What kind of vote of confidence is that?” Khan asks rhetorically.

What turned the tide, he says, was a multipart strategy to make Canary Wharf more competitive with the West End, the City of London, and Europe’s leading financial hubs. He now sees that approach as an intellectual property playbook that CWG could one day take to other markets.

“I’ve got people from China, from the Middle East, Australia, all coming here for tours,” he says, “and we get offers.”

A ‘green and blue’ diversification

Canary Wharf was a product of Margaret Thatcher’s government, the centerpiece of an ambitious redevelopment of London’s crumbling docklands. But from the opening of its first towers in 1991, it suffered from a reputation as a sterile, remote outpost that appealed to few employers other than those in need of large trading floors that old buildings in the City of London could not provide.

Khan joined CWG as CEO in 2019, having been chief operating officer of the US real estate investment trust General Growth Properties. Even before he moved, he recalls: “I’d keep talking to London business leaders, and they were like, ‘Oh, yeah, Canary, I remember it. So many bankers, nothing to do after five, and it’s really hard to get to.’ That was the perception for 30 years.”

He has been much helped by the opening of the Elizabeth line in 2022, which he calls “a game-changer” for improving access to the site. But Khan has also invested in bringing in a much broader array of companies and government agencies, so tenants from outside financial services now account for almost half of his office space.

He has simultaneously diversified a district that once had few apartments, shops, and dining options. About 3,500 residents now live in its apartment buildings — a figure he expects to double by next year. And Canary Wharf has more than doubled the number of retailers, restaurants, bars, and cafes since the pandemic. That has reduced the group’s historic dependence on the office market.

Lately, Khan has focused on creating more “green and blue” spaces like parks and riverside walkways, while “curating” activities and amenities designed to make Canary Wharf feel more like a vibrant community than an office park.

As he walks around the property, he points out outdoor event spaces, a padel center where the booked-up courts cost £80 to £100 an hour, and an Olympic-sized open-water pool that attracted 30,000 swimmers in the month after it opened this summer.

Such attractions may sound like sideshows, but they help bring Khan’s strategy to life. It takes time to change perceptions, he notes, and he needs such tangible symbols to convince potential tenants that Canary Wharf has truly changed.

“It’s like a house renovation. Some people can visualize it, but some people need to see the renovation,” he says.

A playbook that could travel

CWG, owned by Brookfield and the Qatar Investment Authority, is not wholly confined to its 130 acres. The group has developed projects elsewhere in London, including 20 Fenchurch Street, the curving City skyscraper nicknamed “the Walkie-Talkie.”

But Khan says CWG has developed “a lot of expertise” from honing its model, which it can deploy in other districts, cities, and countries.

It may do so over “the medium term,” rather than sooner, he adds, because it still has land to build another 5-7 million square feet, equivalent to seven to 10 new buildings.

For now, “we’ve got enough on our hands,” he says — even as he notes that Canary Wharf Group now prefers to be known by its initials, CWG, so that future partners won’t assume that its ambitions are limited to its current home.

Even as Khan worries about the impact of rising interest rates, he says the London market is “in an up cycle,” and predicts “great demand-supply fundamentals” for the coming years.

Appetite for top office space remains strong across the capital, while CWG’s latest earnings showed that availability in Central London fell 20% year on year as supply in Docklands stayed broadly steady. The shortage of supply elsewhere in London will get worse next year, Khan says, blaming it on UK regulations that have driven up construction costs, deterring new development.

A decade after the Brexit vote, “there’s been minimal flight” of bankers to European capitals, he notes. “But growth is less because of that. There have been jobs added in Amsterdam, Paris, and Frankfurt. But those jobs would have been here if it wasn’t for Brexit. And I think that additional regulation has put those jobs there.”

It is early in Andy Burnham’s tenure as prime minister and Khan is reserving judgment. “They’re very good at listening,” he says of the Labour government, but “we haven’t seen anything that’s been implemented that would be pro-growth.”

“London can still offer culture, creativity, an educated workforce, an attractive time zone, and the rule of law,” he notes. “That’s my point to the government: Just give businesses and individuals a little incentive to invest, and the city will grow.”

Why offices need ecosystems

Prime buildings in the City of London and the West End still charge a premium over Canary Wharf’s rents, and Khan’s business plan depends on narrowing that gap. But his task is not just to convince future tenants that his property is superior to rival offerings: Post-pandemic, he must still make the case for the office itself.

Staff are still pushing back against their employers’ efforts to get them back to their desks for three, four, or five days a week, and Canary Wharf’s tenants have differing policies on how often they expect people in their offices. But they increasingly share one view, Khan says: “You’ve got to have the best space to compete for that talent.”

Office workers no longer just want breakout rooms and good coffee; they expect access to nature and engaging activities. But even as office owners try to create “more of a hospitality vibe” in the buildings themselves, Khan says, what will differentiate business districts is the wider “ecosystem” they provide.

Will movie nights and electric go-kart tracks suffice to keep CWG’s buildings full if, as some predict, AI renders large numbers of office jobs redundant?

Khan, whose estate has not become an AI hub in the way that London’s King’s Cross district has, says there’s no sign yet that AI will empty Canary Wharf of its white-collar workers.

“Just look at our experience in the last 18 months,” he says. “Roughly 60% of the office occupiers are growing their footprint, 20% are roughly the same, and only 20% are shrinking their footprint.”