Locations/Level39, One Canada Square, Canary Wharf
Introduction
Canary Wharf is an area of London, England, located on the Isle of Dogs in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. Canary Wharf is defined by the Greater London Authority as being part of London's central business district, alongside Central London. With the City of London, it constitutes one of the main financial centres in the United Kingdom and the world, containing many high-rise buildings including the fourth tallest in the UK, One Canada Square, which opened on 26 August 1991.
Developed on the site of the former West India Docks, Canary Wharf contains around 16,000,000 sq ft (1,5000,000 m) of office and retail space. It comprises many open areas, including Canada Square, Cabot Square, and Westferry Circus. Together with Heron Quays and Wood Wharf, it forms the Canary Wharf Estate, around 97 acres (39 ha) in area.
Owned wholly by Canary Wharf Group, Level39 launched in March 2013. Since then, Level39 has grown from a simple idea into a three-floor, 80,000 square foot community space occupying the 39th, 26th, and 24th floors of One Canada Square.
History
Canary Wharf is located on the West India Docks on the Isle of Dogs.
Isle of Dogs
The Isle of Dogs is a large peninsula bounded on three sides by a large meander in the River Thames in East London, England, which includes the Cubitt Town, Millwall, and Canary Wharf districts. The area was historically part of the Manor, Hamlet, Parish and, for a time, the wider borough of Poplar. The name had no official status until the 1987 creation of the Isle of Dogs Neighbourhood by Tower Hamlets Borough Council. It has been known locally as simply "the Island" since the 19th century.
The whole area was once known as Stepney Marsh; Anton van den Wyngaerde's "Panorama of London" dated 1543 depicts and refers to the Isle of Dogs. Records show that ships preparing to carry the English royal household to Calais in 1520 docked at the southern bank of the island. The name Isle of Dogs occurs in the Thamesis Descriptio of 1599, applied to a small island in the south-western part of the peninsula. The name is next applied to the Isle of Dogs Farm (originally known as Pomfret Manor) shown on a map of 1683. At the same time, the area was variously known as Isle of Dogs or the Blackwell levels. By 1855, it was incorporated within the parish of Poplar under the aegis of the Poplar Board of Works. This was incorporated into the Metropolitan Borough of Poplar on its formation in 1900.
Level39
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On 18 March, 2013, Mayor of London Boris Johnson opened Level39, a major accelerator space for technologies for the UK's most successful industry, finance.
Based at One Canada Square, Canary Wharf, the space offers businesses a place to create, test, market, and deliver technologies for finance as well as retail.
Level39 forms a major part of Tech City — the government's attempt to make London the tech capital of Europe.
"Attracting the brightest entrepreneurial minds is crucial if London is to maintain its position as the world's foremost financial centre and Level39 will foster just the talent we need to future-proof the capital's technology and financial sectors," Johnson said.
Eric van der Kleij, who previously headed up the Tech City Investment Organisation (TCIO) led Level39. "The timing could not be better to open Level39. London's financial services sector is searching for new technologies to transform itself at the very moment that the tech sector is displaying the sort of growth required to move the UK economy forward," he said.
"Level39 is London's point of convergence for FinTech, situated in the East End, which is the most dynamic area of Europe right now."
