Tanya Gold: Eating in the lobby at Canary Wharf

One Canada Square was the original glass house in east London’s Gotham City, a thrilling tower with a flashing pyramid on that part of the Thames that looks like a despairing U-bend. The Daily Telegraph used to live here, on floors 11 and 12, when I was a gossip columnist; there was no floor 13, architects being afraid of beauty, and also of witches. I love Canary Wharf, and One Canada Square in particular; I always wonder — will it ever be an ancient building? Or will the flood waters overwhelm it? It is like midtown Manhattan, but less substantial, and twice as lost. It is the second tallest building in Britain, after the stupid Shard, and is, architecturally, an homage to the World Trade Center; that is not an elegy I would wish for. The architect César Pelli opened it with a speech quoting Lao Tse: ‘The reality of a hollow object is in the void and not in the walls that define it.’ How true.

Now they have installed a restaurant on the ground floor of One Canada Square, open to the lobby, and wall-less; a waiting room with food, slightly reminiscent of Superman’s ice palace, or a cinema where the only movie is the people who work here, in every shade from bored to depressed to insane. It is cold, mean and riveting.

You enter from the London Underground, which in this parish is monumental, like a spaceship, built for hordes of workers who never came. Up through a subterranean shopping centre full of shrill Christmas bustle and up again, and see the familiar lifts and barriers to the sky and, when I worked here, Charles Moore’s face. Ah, yes, I think of Die Hard.