“It's not only about the space, it's about the place”: Shobi Khan, Canary Wharf Group

“Gone are the days of signing a 10- or 15-year lease and the landlord saying ‘I'll see you in 10 or 15 years’,” says Shobi Khan, CEO of Canary Wharf Group (CWG). He’s talking about the need to work collaboratively with businesses occupying offices and retail units at Canary Wharf, to help them make the most of their spaces.  

Data has a huge role to play. It holds the key to understanding how tenants are using their spaces, how visitors are interacting with businesses and what occupancy patterns and changing behaviours tell CWG about the trends shaping business and society. 

Accelerating change

Khan says businesses are responding to an accelerating pace of change. As such they need greater agility in terms of how they use, adapt and derive insight from their spaces, to deliver improved customer and employee experience and greater cost efficiency.

CWG’s investments in technology are enabling innovations such as frictionless entry to buildings, with digital passes that can be added to smartphone wallets, and sophisticated energy management.

“We can track all the energy points in an office and monitor usage, where the load is and how to manage that load in the morning versus the evening and make adjustments to increase energy efficiency,” says Khan. 

Such insights follow investment in CWG’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) system and data strategy. 

“For each different sector we're harnessing data,” says Khan. “We can track our retailers' sales, not only by location but by category like restaurants versus apparel, to see how each is performing, how we can help, and what we should be doing to anticipate trends.”

Return to the office

One trend nobody fully anticipated was the pandemic that struck during Khan’s first year at the helm of CWG, creating disruptions still felt today, and encouraging Khan to accelerate a strategy to adapt and diversify.

To offer the greatest choice, Khan oversaw changes that mean CWG can offer anything from a desk among the entrepreneurial community in its Level39 coworking space, to a fully furnished, bespoke turnkey office from its MadeFor product.

A fully integrated offering including in-house contractors, engineers and designers strengthens CWG’s ability to quickly and collaboratively respond to change.

A city within a city 

Over 150,000 people live within one mile of Canary Wharf but approximately 70% of residents do not work there, illustrating the extent to which Canary Wharf has shed its reputation as a place people only went for work. 

Last year, 72 million people visited Canary Wharf.

“It’s a city within a city now,” says Khan, pointing to over 300 bars, cafes, restaurants, shops and amenities such as GoBoats and padel courts within the 130 acre site. Commercial real estate advisor Green Street recently rated Canary Wharf’s retail centre as the number one retail destination in the UK.

Another perception shattered is the idea that Canary Wharf is all about financial services. The likes of Barclays, Citibank, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley and Société Générale all occupy office space, but Khan says financial services only accounts for 55% of occupancy.  

“We are home to a growing life science community, a significant government hub and to University College London’s Business School,” says Khan on the variety of tenants around the Docklands development.  

The UK Health Security Agency, MHRA (Medicines & Healthcare products Regulatory Agency), NHS London, Barts Health and Genomics England are all located at Canary Wharf. And in a couple of years CWG will be opening Europe’s largest purpose-built life sciences building next to its Elizabeth Line station.  

A holistic, data-powered view of its operation is critical to encouraging further growth of its “mixed-use neighbourhood.” Data is helping CWG understand the relationships between uses - from how growth in commercial premises drives demand for residential, to how hotel demand is driven by growth in office and leisure uses. 

CWG currently has approximately £2 billion of development under construction and is about to embark on the next wave of residential launches and hotel openings. 

A stronger sense of place and purpose 

But successfully meeting the demands of customers is about far more than the building. 

“It's not only about the space, it's about the place,” says Khan, discussing investments CWG has made in green spaces such as its recently opened Eden Dock. 

CWG also supports how customers manage waste in-house and implement circular economy principles, such as turning used coffee cups into high quality stationery. As a result of its practices, CWG has achieved zero waste to landfill since 2009.  

Canary Wharf also boasts over 100 pieces of art on display around its estate — making it the largest free outdoor art collection anywhere in the UK — and hosts community initiatives such as a summer concert series, open air screenings of family movies and winter lights installations. 

Canary Wharf sits around two miles north of the Greenwich Observatory, home of Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) which dictates the UK’s ability to share a working day with every major economy in the world.  

However, Khan is aware that for all London’s historical advantages nothing can be taken for granted, and investments in transformative technologies and innovation are essential if the UK’s capital is to maintain its place on the world stage.