The likeable Canadian is estates manager at the wharf, responsible for implementing and maintaining four landscaped parks, and for ensuring the estate is kept spotless and litter-free. He is also in charge of security, running the largest private force in the UK. But it’s the parks he is most enthusiastic about.
Partington’s excuse for loitering in Jubilee Park when most people would be in bed was to check out its night-time ambience. “I’m sitting reading my paper on a bench at 11.30 at night,” he says. “I look up and there’s this mother with two kids walking home through the park. The kids started playing: scrambling up on the rock walls and the water fountains and splashing in the water. I was amazed.”
These nocturnal visitors are a testament to the estate’s design, part of a masterplan that aimed to attract all kinds of people to this new district of London. “We could have just built standard buildings on a basic street, but we went beyond that from
day one,” says Partington.
The scale of the planting, and the quantity, variety and size of plants on display has rarely been attempted in other developments. The four parks alone cover 3.9 ha, while the landscaped areas of the estate include more than 42 species of tree.
Partington became involved in the landscaping of Canary Wharf in 1989, having been brought in as a construction manager at the start of development in 1988. “At that time, nobody else wanted to get involved in landscaping because they knew nothing about the subject,” he says. “People were saying: ‘Who knows anything about it? We don’t know. We’ve always concentrated on building. Tony knows, let’s ask him.’ And that’s how I got involved in tree selection.”
So why does he know all about trees? “In my career in North America, I happened to have been on projects that involved a very substantial element of landscaping,” he says. His first major project was in Calgary, Canada, where he used trees to screen open spaces from the Chinook winds, and chose plants for extremes of dry, cold and wet weather. He went to Toronto next, working on a building that had an assortment of roof gardens. “I spent the best part of a summer lifting gardens onto a 15-storey building and lowering them into light wells,” he says.
One Canada Square sits easily on the skyline. It’s lovely inside and has lovely views.
It works well too – we’ve had to do virtually nothing to it since 1990. It’s now an iconTony Partington, estates manager, Canary Wharf Group
On the back of this project, Partington was sent to the World Financial Centre in New York. He managed the planting of the enclosed winter garden, and the transportation of 16 palm trees from the Mojave Desert in south-eastern California. There are no palms at Canary Wharf, but Partington has reintroduced elm trees to the UK after they were wiped out by Dutch elm disease in the 1970s. The elms are in Montgomery Square, a hard-landscaped piazza set for completion at the end of this year.
It’s another new look for an estate whose parks – Westferry Circus, Cabot Square, Canada Square and Jubilee Park – were all designed with a different function in mind.
Chill out, catch a few rays
The first to be completed was Westferry Circus. “It’s a place where you just chill out,” says Partington. “You turn your attention off the buildings and the traffic around you and just look at a very lovely garden. It’s designed for you to just sit there and look at the people going by.” In summer, it becomes mecca for anyone working on their tan. “In Westferry Circus, you’ll find the sun hounds,” he says. “They just lie there catching the sun.”
Jubilee Park is another popular spot for sunbathers: “The park’s walls have been designed to give shelter from winds and the trees are there to screen out the buildings. In London everyone wears a sweater or a coat if they go outside, so the idea was to allow people to go outside without their coats, without making a major effort about it. They just grab the benches, sit down, enjoy the sun, have some shelter, eat their food, watch the people, look at the fountain and chill out.”
Sun lovers feature less prominently in Cabot Square. This is a hard-landscaped piazza located at the heart of the development, and a popular spot for lunch. The landscaping makes it an ideal venue for events such as Canary Wharf’s annual motor show.
View from the executive floors
25 North Colonnade is my favourite. The building’s design maximises the availability of natural light, particularly in the lobby. It’s a most user-friendly building
Jim Allan, director, estate management, Canary Wharf Group
Concerts and shows are also held in Canada
Square, a semi-formal space with a high-performance lawn. The other parks were created first and foremost for visitors but Canada Square’s bold
layout is designed to be viewed from above. “You could get 3000 people max into that park,” says Partington. “But there are 20,000 people up in the buildings looking down on it. That’s why it has features like the big skylight sculpture and the
curving paths, and uses of colours that are highly recognisable from a distance.”
To give the tower dwellers something else to look at, the estate is now installing sedum roofs on any building that can be seen from above. This very low-maintenance shrub is green in winter, red in spring and flowers in the summer.
Across the estate, Partington has added so much plant life that the place has its own food chain. “What we have found is that if we do something that is appealing to humans, it is generally appealing to a wide variety of other wildlife,” he says. The estate has attracted insect and bird species, with falcons and black redstarts nesting on roofs.
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