A Chinese Company Will Build London's Tallest Tower, Brexit or No

In 2013, the architecture firm HOK was approached by a representative of the Greenland Group, China’s third-largest developer. “They said they were investing in London and that they’d made an offer on a parcel,” said HOK Senior Vice President Larry Malcic, who sat, on a recent afternoon, holding a cup of tea in his firm’s London office. “They’d done their homework.”

The land in question was a run-down warehouse adjacent to Canary Wharf, an area in the far eastern end of the city that grew popular in recent decades for its proximity to London’s financial center. Nothing in the area, however, would match what the Greenland Group hoped to build: an £800 million ($996.9 million), 67-story tower, which, when completed, would be the tallest residential tower in Western Europe. “From the beginning, they saw it as a fundamentally residential tower,” Malcic said. “And they wanted to get value out of the site, so we’ve gone as tall as you can go.” (That’s a literal statement: Any higher and the tower would violate London City Airport’s flight path.)