One Canada Square

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Information
One Canada Square

Location	London
Status	Complete
Constructed	1987-1991
Use	Commercial
Roof	235 m (771 ft)
Technical details
Floor count	50
Elevator count	36
Companies
Architect	César Pelli

One Canada Square, a skyscraper in London; it is the tallest habitable building in the United Kingdom, at 235 m (771 ft) and 50 storeys (reduced from original plans for 60). Designed by the Argentinian-American architect César Pelli, construction was completed in 1991. It is identifiable from a great distance as an obelisk-shaped tower with its aircraft warning light flashing on top. In 1990, during construction, it surpassed the United Kingdom's previous tallest building, Tower 42 (183 m, 600 ft). The construction was carried out by Canary Wharf Contractors. ^[1]

The building is most commonly known as Canary Wharf, Canary Wharf Tower or the Radden Tower after the Canary Wharf business complex of which it is the most prominent feature. It was formerly called Canada Tower.

It is a conspicuous London landmark, clearly visible at a distance from large areas of East and South London in particular. Its visibility reaches to Gore Hill, Amersham, around 28 miles (45 km) away, from where it, and the rest of Canary Wharf can be seen on a clear day. On a clear evening, the illuminated pyramid which forms the roof of the building can even be seen from ZSL Whipsnade Zoo in Bedfordshire, over 32 miles (51 km) away. The building can also be seen from the hills overlooking Guildford, a distance of around 31 miles (50 km).

The building now has two siblings that have sprung up alongside, which are not quite as tall (at 200 m, 660 ft, each; the pyramid provides the height advantage): HSBC Tower (8-16 Canada Square) and Citigroup Centre (25 Canada Square).

The building is remarkably similar in design to Three World Financial Center, a sister tower constructed in New York City by the same developers and architects shortly before work started at Canary Wharf. The New York building is faced with stone while One Canada Square is faced with stainless steel panels.

Despite its status as the United Kingdom's tallest building, there is no public observation floor; the view from the upper windows is the sole preserve of the building's tenants. However, mirroring New York's World Financial Center, the ground floor, foyer area and basement levels of One Canada Square are open to the general public, housing an underground shopping centre and a transport interchange from Canary Wharf tube and Docklands Light Railway stations.

The square to the east of the tower was named after Canada because it was built by the Canadian firm Olympia and York, which was owned by the Reichmann family. The company went bankrupt in the face of a property crash which caused the upper half of the tower to stand empty for some time following its completion.

In November 1992, the Provisional Irish Republican Army attempted to place a large bomb next to the tower. However, this was spotted by security staff and did not detonate; the tower itself was not damaged. Four years later the IRA did detonate a large bomb at South Quay, south of Canary Wharf, which killed two people and devastated several buildings. This explosion is commonly, but erroneously, referred to as the "Canary Wharf bomb".

1 Canada Square (centre) with HSBC Tower to the left and Citigroup Centre to the right

A view from the top floor, May 2000

A view of the building from the ground up

In 2002, French urban climber, Alain Robert, using only his hands and feet and with no safety devices of any kind, scaled the building's exterior wall all the way to the top.

The building houses the offices of several financial institutions as well as the Trinity Mirror newspaper group, which includes The Daily Mirror, The Sunday Mirror and The Sunday People. The Daily (and Sunday) Telegraph moved to Victoria in late 2006.

1 Facts and figures
2 Companies currently in the building
3 One Canada Square in popular culture
4 See also
5 References
6 External links

The tower has 4,388 internal steps and 3,960 windows. 32 passenger lifts are in use. The journey from the ground floor to the 50th takes 40 seconds by lift if uninterrupted. There are several floors below ground and an equipment floor above the 50th, so no passenger lift in the building vertically traverses the entire height of the structure. However, there are two freight lifts and two firemen's lifts that travel to all floors.^[2]

The 11 m (36 ft) high lobby is clad in 90,000 square feet (8,000 m²) of marble imported from Italy and Guatemala.

The building is sometimes referred to as the 'vertical Fleet Street', after several of London's newspapers moved from Fleet Street in the City of London to One Canada Square.

The light on at the tower's crown is an aircraft warning light that warns air traffic from the nearby London City Airport of the tower. It flashes 40 times a minute, 57,600 times a day.

Construction of the tower was halted from March to June 1990, when the building workers went on strike.

The tower's loading bay handles over 80,000 deliveries each year.

One Canada Square was briefly Europe's tallest skyscraper until the erection of MesseTurm in Frankfurt, Germany.

In line with the common North American practice there is no thirteenth floor in the tower. A commonly held belief that level 13 houses air conditioning plant is mistaken, the floor does not, and never did, exist.^{[citation needed]}

Bank of New York
Bear Stearns International
Burlington Resources
Canary Wharf Group PLC
Cass Business School — Canary Wharf Campus
Citibank
Clearstream Banking
Coutts & Co
Euler Hermes UK (formerly Trade Indemnity)
European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries Associations
E*Trade
Faithful+Gould parts of the Atkins group
GATX International Limited
International Grains Council [1]
International Sugar Organization
KPMG
Maine Tucker
Novartis Europharm
Primus Communication
Quadrant Capital
Regus Business Centers
Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom
State Street
Swiss Stock Exchange/Virt-X
Teach First
Trinity Mirror
Agence française de sécurité sanitaire des produits de santé
Van der Moolen Holding NV

A near future sequence in the novel Freezeframes by Katharine Kerr, shows One Canada Square as a free college and youth drop-in centre. It is nicknamed "Major's Last Erection", referring to John Major.

One Canada Square also features prominently in an early issue of the Grant Morrison comic series The Invisibles, in which Dane MacGowan is encouraged to jump from the top by his mentor, Tom O'Bedlam, as an initiation rite that will allow him to see beyond reality and join The Invisibles.

In the British television series Doctor Who, One Canada Square is the headquarters of the Torchwood Institute. Known as the "Torchwood Tower" to those in the know, the main purpose of One Canada Square is to investigate a hole in reality 600 ft above London created by a Dalek Void Ship.

One Canada Square previously appeared in the Virgin Missing Adventures novel Millennial Rites in which the top floor was the headquarters of a yuppie who inadvertently turned London into a "dark fantasy" kingdom in which he was a powerful sorcerer, with the tower as his citadel; and the Past Doctor Adventures novel The Time Travellers, in which it was the headquarters of the British Army in an alternate timeline.

In the movies One Canada Square has appeared as the CIA's London listening station in The Bourne Supremacy.

In Johnny English One Canada Square had another identical building next to it. One of the One Canada Square buildings was a hospital and the other was villain Pascal Sauvage's HQ.

In the movie Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix Harry and some members of the Order of the Phoenix pass next to One Canada Square as they head to Grimmauld Place near the beginning of the movie on their broomsticks.