JP Morgan is building the biggest office in British history right here in East London. The banks of canary wharf are managing trillions in green finance. And yet just minutes down the road, Newham is the most deprived borough in London, its residents are being evicted at record rates, and its streets flood because the drains are Victorian. Something does not add up.
If you stand on the roof of 25 Bank street in Canary Wharf on any given morning you can see almost all of east London at once. To the west, the glass towers of the financial district. To the north and east, the rooftops of Stratford, west ham and Plaistow. Two words sharing the same skyline. Two worlds that could not be further apart.
Yet that distance is about to get harder to ignore.
In November 2025, JPMorgan Chase announced that it would build a new headquarters on the riverside south site in Canary Wharf. At three million square feet, it will no doubt be the largest office building in British history, more than a third bigger than AXA’s 22 Bishops-gate, the current record holder. It will house unto 12,000 employees, JPMorgan says that the development will pump £9.9 billion into the local economy over six years and will create 7,800 jobs during construction and beyond.
Jamie Dimon, also known as “the king of wall street”, who is the bank’s chairman and chief executive, said that the UK governments focus on economic growth had been a critical factor in the decision. Chancellor Rachel Reeves, called it a “multi-billion pound vote of confidence” in the UK economy. The mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, described it as a “huge lot of confidence in the capitals”s future.
Nobody in that chorus of approval even slightly mentioned Newham.
The Most Deprived Borough in London. Right Next Door
Newham sits less than two miles from Canary Wharf. It is not a coincidence that it is also, according to the 2025 Indices of Multiple Deprivation, the single most deprived borough in London. More that four-fifths of the borough falls into the bottom 30 percent of income deprivation nationally. Its overall deprivation score has risen since 2019, even as neighbouring boroughs like Hackney have improved.
The numbers are stark. According to Trust for London, Newham recorded 8.24 repossessions per 1000 households in 2025, the highest rate in the capital. Kensington and Chelsea, on the other side of the city, recorded 0.72. In new ham, 38 percent of residents live in poverty once housing costs are accounted for, and 44 percent of children grow up poor. Nearly a quarter of residents earn below the London Living wage.
Nye Jones, head of campaigns at generation rent, put it plainly:
“The combination of really high and low rent incomes, which is most pronounced in Newham, creates poverty and destitution.”
These are not abstract statistics. They are the financial reality of life in a borough that shares a postcode district with one of the most powerful concentrations of capital on the planet.
The Green Finance Paradox
Here is where it gets complicated. And interesting.
The banks headquartered in Canary Wharf are not just in the business of making money. They are increasingly in the business of saving the planet. Or at least, that is the pitch. HSBC, Natwest, Barclays, and yes, JPMorgan, are among the biggest players in the global green bond and sustainable finance market. The London Stock Exchange’s Sustainable Bond Market has become one of the most active in the world, with billions in teen and sustainability-linked issuance every year.
The Financial Conduct Authority’s chair, Ashley Alder, told a Bloomberg climate finance event in October 2025 that the UK has a genuine opportunity to become the world’s sustainable finance centre. The Bank of England has published climate stress tests, climate disclosure frameworks, and regular speeches about the financial risks of a warming planet.
And yet Tower Hamlets, the borough that contains Canary Wharf, had a flood risk management strategy that expired way back in 2022 and has still not been replaced. The borough’s own scrutiny lead confirmed this in a report to the council in December 2024 that it remains non-compliant with its statutory duty as a lead local flood authority.
Across the borough boundary in Newham, a 2025 strategic Flood Risk Assessment found that climate change could increase fluvial flood extents among the Rivers Lea and Rodin by more than 50 percent by the end of the century. The University of East London published research in February 2026 noting that much of east London’s drainage network still relies on Victorian Era sewers that were never designed to handle modern rainfall elves, let alone the more intense storms a warming climate is already producing.
To put this bluntly: the global green finance industry is being run from buildings in a flood zone, while the people who live in that flood zone are being evicted at the highest rate in London.
What the Markers Are Saying
None of this is happening inside a vacuum. The macro backdrop matters here.
The Bank of England has been cautious about cutting interest rates. Inflation has proved to be stickier than hoped for. mortgage rates seem to remain elevated by historical standards, and landlords across East London who bought on cheap credit are feeling the squeeze. In Newham, that means more repossessions, more families pushed into temporary acclimation in London, with 58.86 households per 1,000 living in temporary housing.
Meanwhile, JPMorgan’s new building will take six years to complete. Its construction cost is expected to run into serval billion pounds. It will bring jobs, footfall, and tac revenue to tower hamlets. The Canary Wharf Group, the developer co-building the project, has said the pans include a new public parkland and improved access to the Riverside area.
But the history of Canary Wharf’s relationship with its surrounding communities is rather complicated. The Docklands transformation that began in the 1980s created enormous wealth within its boundaries. It did not lift Newham, Tower Hamlets, or Hackney out of poverty. Forty years later, these boroughs are still dominating the deprivation indices.
Now the question is whether this time will be different, and whether the green fiancé revolution being championed in these same towers will reach the streets that sit in their shadow.
The Money Exists. The Question Is Where It Goes
The mayor of London’s Green Finance Fund had committed £78 million to low-carbon transformation projects across the capital, including social housing retrofits. The London Climate Finance Facility, still being developed, has set an explicit goal of ensuring that all parts of London benefit from the transition to net zero not just the wealthy ones.
These are encouraging signs, But the sheer scale of what is needed in East London, both for climate resilience and for basic. Economic survival, dwarfs what is curerently on offer. Flooding defences, drainage upgrades, retrofitting thousands of cold, leaky homes in some of the most deprived streets in England: none of this comes cheap, and none of it is being funded at anything close to the pace that is required.
The irony here is that the expertise and the capital to do it are both sitting in Canary Wharf. The question is whether any of it finds its way over the postcode boundary.
JPMorgan’s new building will dominate the East London Skyline upon completion. You will be able to spot it from Stratford, from Plaistow, from the estates of West Ham. The people who live there will watch it go up, floor by floor, year by year.
Whether they will benefit from it is another question entirely.
