Inside London’s Huge Experiment in Predicting the Housing Future

In 2013, Knight Dragon Developments Ltd. purchased a 150-acre chunk of land in east London. It was on a peninsula across the river from Canary Wharf, a development consisting mostly of banks and financial institutions. The previous owner’s plan was to use it largely as a kind of “back office” space for the white-collar companies: A mix of office buildings with a few apartment buildings thrown in.

Knight Dragon had something else entirely in mind. Developers envisioned a city within a city: Greenwich Peninsula, a place with more than 15,000 housing units and 3.5 million square feet of ancillary development such as hotels, retail, and schools—a place that would appeal to the millennials and yuppies of the future. The whole plan would take up to 25 years to build and cost 8.4 billion pounds ($9.5 billion).