From Heron Quays to West India Quay with the umbrella still furled

Why the estate can be crossed with a dry collar

Canary Wharf was built with a lower level that most visitors only find by accident. Beneath the squares, a run of shopping malls links the stations to one another: Jubilee Place in the south, the Jubilee line ticket hall beside it, Canada Place under the middle of the estate and Cabot Place to the west, wrapped around the DLR platforms. On a wet evening that lower level is the estate's real street, and the people who work here use it the way other Londoners use a bus.

Above ground the towers do strange things to weather. Rain that falls straight down in Limehouse arrives sideways in Canada Square, because the gaps between the buildings pull the wind off the dock and speed it up. An umbrella is a poor tool here and a roof is a good one. This note walks the roofed route from Heron Quays in the south to West India Quay in the north: under a kilometre, about fifteen minutes at an evening pace, and no more than three or four of them spent outside.

Heron Quays to Jubilee Place: the first wet minute

Heron Quays is the DLR stop on the south side of the estate, one stop before Canary Wharf on a northbound train. It is the least sheltered start on the route. From the platform exit to the nearest doors of Jubilee Place allow a minute or two in the open, and keep close to the buildings, whose overhangs take some of what the sky is doing.

Jubilee Place is the smallest of the malls and, on a night like this, the most useful, because its lower level connects straight into the Jubilee line ticket hall. That is the first dry link. Mall door to ticket hall takes about two minutes, and once you are under the station's long roof the weather stops being your problem.

If the evening starts on the Jubilee line you begin here anyway. Come off the escalators, ignore the glass canopies that lead up into Jubilee Park, and follow the signs for the malls rather than for the street.

Under the square: the ticket hall to Canada Place

From the ticket hall a passage runs north under the estate to Canada Place, the mall beneath Canada Square and One Canada Square. Two to three minutes at a normal pace. It is lit like an airport corridor and used like one: people cross it with a coffee in hand and never look at a shop window, which is the right way to treat it. You are not here to browse. You are using a basement to cross a district.

Canada Place is the hinge of the route. Escalators rise from it to the square above, which matters if your table is in one of the pavilions there, and a second passage carries on west towards Cabot Place. For meeting somebody in the middle of the estate on a wet night, the foot of those escalators beats any bench on the square, and it beats 'outside the station' by a distance, since at Canary Wharf that phrase describes three different buildings.

Cabot Place, where the DLR lives indoors

West of Canada Place the passage becomes Cabot Place, about three minutes on. This is where the DLR station sits, under a glass roof and wrapped by the mall on both sides, so a change onto the DLR here can be made without a raindrop. Cabot Place also holds Boisdale, whose band is the usual reason people are still in the building after the shops have closed.

From Jubilee Place to the Cabot Place platforms is about eight minutes of walking, none of it in the open. That is the number worth keeping. It means anybody arriving on the Jubilee line or the DLR can reach the other side of the estate dry, and that a meeting point anywhere along the chain can be kept even when the forecast was optimistic.

The one station this chain does not reach is the Elizabeth line, which has a building of its own out in the North Dock. Getting there means a bridge.

Two bridges with no roof, and the train that beats both

North of Cabot Place the estate runs into water, and both ways across it are open to the sky. The first is the Adams Plaza Bridge, from the north side of Canada Square to Crossrail Place, the long timber latticed building that holds the Elizabeth line. From the Canada Place escalators to the Crossrail Place doors is about four minutes, the bridge itself about one of them. Head down, brisk pace, and you arrive only slightly damp.

The second is the floating footbridge over the North Dock to West India Quay, the row of Georgian sugar warehouses that now holds the Museum of London Docklands and a run of restaurants, with a large hotel behind. From the Cabot Square side it is about four minutes to the quay, two of them on the bridge with the wind coming straight down the dock. They are the wettest two minutes of the whole route and nothing can be done about them.

Or take the train. From the Cabot Place platforms a northbound DLR reaches West India Quay in one stop, and from Heron Quays in two, so the most thoroughly covered way from one end of this route to the other is to sit down for about four minutes. The walk is for when you want to see the towers lit through wet glass, or when the evening has somewhere to be in between.

When the doors lock

The malls are private property, run by the estate rather than the railway, and they keep the estate's hours. The shops close in the early evening. The passages stay open well past that because they carry people to the trains, but late at night the estate begins securing doors, and some links close before the last train has gone. Those hours belong to the estate and they change, so nothing here pretends to a timetable.

Two fixed points survive the night. The Jubilee line ticket hall stays open while its trains run, with its canopies in Jubilee Park, and the DLR station has its own way in from the street. Late on, then, the route has more sky in it. From Heron Quays, walk north across Jubilee Park rather than under it. From the Jubilee canopies, cross Canada Square on foot. From Cabot Square it is the bridge or the train. Eight dry minutes become six wet ones, which is a fair trade for not meeting a locked door at the foot of an escalator.

For the same reason this desk names a hotel lobby rather than a mall door as the meeting point for anything starting after about ten. A lobby is lit, staffed and open all night, and it does not depend on anybody's shutters.

An evening that uses the route

A wet night on the estate is a reason to plan indoors, not a reason to cancel. The quiet version of the girlfriend experience suits it best: no reserved table unless you want one, a walk that happens to have a roof, a drink in Cabot Place and an unhurried return. Two hours at £500 covers the route end to end with a table in the middle of it, and three at £700 leaves room for the warehouses at West India Quay and whatever follows them.

Two women on the brunettes column are especially good company for it. Molly photographs buildings at night and knows that rain is when the towers look best, doubled in the wet paving of Canada Square, so she will want a minute longer on the Adams Plaza Bridge than the weather strictly allows. Lucy prefers old buildings and quiet rooms, and she will steer the walk to West India Quay, where the warehouses are nearly two centuries older than anything else in view.

The estate is mapped street by street on the Canary Wharf page, and the rest of the postcode on E14. Which door to name for a first meeting, given that the three stations are three different buildings, is set out in the station note. Send Maude the start point and the hour and she will name the door.