The CEO who put Canary Wharf back on the map
Semafor · Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson ·
Shobi Khan’s success in filling the east London site is tempting him to think about international expansion.
The Signal Interview
“Everybody wrote this place off,” Shobi Khan says as he walks a visitor around Canary Wharf, the 130-acre estate he has overseen since 2019. After the UK’s banker-scaring vote to leave the European Union, and an office-emptying pandemic, the refrain he kept hearing was: “It’s over. Bad experiment. Why did we do that?”
Khan still remembers his fury when a rival London property developer wrote in 2024 that Canary Wharf needed “a drastic transformation” to survive, but those doubts were widely shared at the time. Just when the east London business district might have been celebrating a post-COVID rebound, it lost a series of prominent tenants, including HSBC, Moody’s, and Clifford Chance.