An end in itself

Business Editor, Sunday Herald

Saturday 28 July 2012

Travel: London.

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Colin Donald

The London Olympics is merely a completion party marking the end of the long transformation of the East End, from bombed-out gangsters' playground to the city's economic renaissance made concrete and glass. Mere minutes from the Stratford exertions, Docklands is now financial London's transplanted heart, a planned paradise of skyscrapers and quayside modernism. Built on top of a subterranean burrow of shopping emporia, its smorgasbord of restaurants and coffee bars will be more familiar to visitors from Tokyo, Vancouver, Stockholm or Singapore than they will be to most Britons outside Planet London.

Here in the heart of the scrubbed-up, gentrified docks, the colour, custom and chaos of old London's commercial guts is symbolised in the place names: Canary Wharf, Heron Quays, West India Dock, Canada Water, Mudchute. Although scraps of this heritage have survived, self-conscious public art replaces a casually cosmopolitan, vanished urban culture. For the 2012 visitor, basing yourself here is the smart choice for accessing the alternative London of trendy galleries, neglected 18th-century churches, the unadorned ethnic eating places of Shoreditch, Whitechapel, Spitalfields and Limehouse, and for the new capital that is rising in the east.The Four Seasons Canary Wharf, commanding access to the great loop of the Thames called the Isle of Dogs, is the best strategic launch pad to witness the east London renaissance at close quarters. Most people are here for work in the adjacent business hub, which makes leisure here all the sweeter.Run by Michael Purtill, formerly the manager of Turnberry in South Ayrshire and now a persuasive advocate of the area, the Four Seasons Canary Wharf represents comfort at its most understated and intuitive, even more of a consideration for weekend family visitors than for busy weekday business visitors. It's a family-friendly hotel and the service has thoughtful touches of character and flair that mean more than five-star politeness. The rooms and suites have day and night views of curvy riverine cityscapes, and diners at the magnificent modern north Italian restaurant Quadrato can watch chefs prepare sfizi – Italian tapas – through glass walls. Guests can also use next door's Virgin Active health club and spa, its riverside glass boxed infinity pool bringing you as close as you ever want to get to immersion in the Thames.You can get all the vibrant colour of the Docklands history, stretching back to pre-Roman times, at the Museum of London Docklands, surely one of the UK's best (and free) new museums, with its recreations of Victorian "sailortown", spice-smelling stations and powerful confrontation with the legacy of the slave trade. Heading towards inner London at Bethnal Green there are other under-appreciated gems of the city's museum scene: Whitechapel Art Gallery, the V&A's Museum Of Childhood, Shoreditch's extraordinary time-capsule house museum Dennis Severs House, and near it the family-oriented Geffrye Museum Of The Home.When the 18th-century sage Dr Johnson said, "He who is tired of London is tired of life," he hadn't queued for Madame Tussauds or paid £18 to enter Buckingham Palace. Time, then, to forego the hackneyed West End and go east to an ancient, colour-soaked global trading hub, long relegated to the past, now seen as London's future.TRAVEL NOTESGETTING THERECityJet has return flights from Dundee to London City from about £170. Visit www.cityjet.com. BA has return flights from Glasgow or Edinburgh to London City from about £114. Visit www.ba.com. Return family train tickets from Edinburgh or Glasgow to King's Cross or Euston cost from around £120 for a family of four if booked in advance with family railcards.WHERE TO STAYRooms at the Four Seasons Canary Wharf cost from £180 per night. Visit www.fourseasons.com/canarywharf or call 020 7510 1999.WHAT TO DOTour Guides offers daily Olympic walks, highlighting London's industrial past. Visit www,tourguides.co.uk /bookings-single.php.

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