Canary Wharf
A map of the Canary Wharf estate — the financial district raised on the old West India Docks at the top of the Isle of Dogs. The landmarks are hand-picked: the skyscrapers (from One Canada Square, the tower that started it all in 1991, to the residential giants of Wood Wharf), the shopping malls that run beneath the towers, the stations and the pier (Jubilee line, Elizabeth line, four DLR stops and the river bus), the parks, squares and gardens, and a couple of sights around the docks.
On top of that, the map carries every named café, restaurant, supermarket, shop and company office on and around the estate, live from OpenStreetMap. Use the toggles to show or hide a type; tap a marker for what it is, with links to open it in your phone’s maps app or Google Maps. Tap the button to drop a pin on your current location. Names appear next to the markers as you zoom in.
Loading places from OpenStreetMap…
Reading the estate
Canary Wharf is really three layers. At street level it reads as towers and squares; underneath, almost everything is connected by four shopping malls (Cabot Place, Canada Place, Jubilee Place and Crossrail Place), so most of the cafés, shops and supermarkets on this map are actually indoors, a level or two below the dots — worth knowing in the rain. And around the edges the docks themselves survive: the towers stand on what was, until 1980, the busiest cargo dock system in the world. The Georgian sugar warehouses across the water at West India Quay — now the museum and a row of restaurants — are the last of the original buildings.
The estate has also stopped being purely a banking district: the Wood Wharf quarter to the east (One Park Drive, Eden Dock) is mostly homes, and the roof garden over the Elizabeth line station is one of the nicer free spots in east London to sit under a tree.
How it’s built
One self-contained page, built on free and open tools. MapLibre GL draws the map from Ordnance Survey vector tiles (OS Vector Tile API, proxied by this site’s server so the API key never reaches the browser), and the basemap follows your device’s light or dark mode. The landmark markers are a hand-picked list written into the page, with positions checked against OpenStreetMap; the cafés, restaurants, supermarkets, shops, offices and green spaces are fetched at load time from the Overpass API, which queries live OpenStreetMap data — here, every named place of those kinds in a box around the estate.
So the map appears instantly, it first draws a saved snapshot that ships with the page (and, on repeat visits, your browser’s cached copy of the last live result), then quietly refreshes from the live Overpass API in the background and swaps in anything that’s changed. If the live service is busy or unreachable, you still get the full snapshot rather than a blank map.
A caveat on the data
Canary Wharf changes fast — towers top out, tenants move (HSBC is leaving 8 Canada Square for the City), shops and restaurants turn over, and new phases of Wood Wharf keep opening. Heights and dates in the landmark popups are the commonly cited figures, not survey data. The live layers are only as good as OpenStreetMap’s volunteer coverage: a new opening can be missing, a closed one can linger, and the office layer is the patchiest — most tenants of the towers aren’t individually mapped, so treat it as a sample, not a directory. Check the estate’s own site for current openings and events.
Some of the figures in the charts and tables on this page were compiled with the help of AI tools and may contain errors or be out of date. They are shared in good faith for general interest only — not as professional, financial, investment or purchasing advice — and should be checked against the cited primary sources before you rely on them.