Lord Levene Interview, Canary 2000
Lord Levene of Portsoken, former Lord Mayor of the City of London, talks to Kamin Mohammadi about success, the Docklands Light Railway and his contribution to the rise of Canary Wharf
Peter Levene has always been a busy man. At 26, he became the youngest managing director of a UK public company (United Scientific Holdings); he was one of Michael Heseltine’s advisers in 1984, MoD Chief of Defence Procurement from 1985-91, chairman of Docklands Light Railway from 1991-94, and chairman and CEO of Canary Wharf Ltd from 1993-96 – to name but a few of his jobs.
I wonder where he gets the time. ‘Keep going,’ he says. ‘You just try to do the best that you can.’Lord Levene has certainly done that. He turned United Scientific Holdings into a thriving public company worth £153 million, and as Chief of Defence Procurement – by his own reckoning – he saved the nation £900 million. When he became DLR chairman, it was, he says: ‘A standing joke. But actually it was worse than that, because it was the only lifeline people had down there.’ It was in this role that he got to know Canary Wharf and Paul Reichmann, who was ‘anxious that we should succeed in sorting out the railway’.
Which, of course, he duly did. Meanwhile, Canary Wharf was experiencing its own financial problems. When the company was taken out of administration in 1993, Levene was brought in. ‘We managed to reinvigorate the development and when Reichmann came back, we had got the banks all their money back and I handed it back to him in a much better state than it had been in when I had taken it on.’
Levene’s subsequent work has enabled him to spend more time in Canary Wharf, especially when he advised the present government on the Jubilee Line Extension. ‘The place has gone from being somewhere with very poor transport links to being one of the very best,’ he says. In fact, the Wharf is now the most connected part of London, the DLR having been joined by buses, boats, the Jubilee Line, and links to City Airport.
But Canary Wharf’s success is based on more than transport, says Levene. ‘When I first went there, most of the retail operation consisted of a few barrows down in the mall. When I left, I think there were something like 70 shops and restaurants down there. Now there are a couple of hundred. The retail has gone from being a service for the people who worked there to becoming an important centre in its own right. The quality of the place is exceptional.’
Levene feels the combination of the City and Canary Wharf is key to London’s continued financial growth. ‘The two are entirely complementary,’ he says. ‘It doesn’t take a genius to see that the City will eventually get closer and closer to Canary Wharf. The distance between the two is, in fact, considerably less than between uptown and downtown Manhattan.’
And a last word from Lord Levene? ‘I would say that if anyone wanted to make a shrewd investment, the place to buy property right now is between Tower Hill and Canary Wharf.’ And this free from a man whose advice has been sought by prime ministers.
Factfile
Lord Levene has worked for a variety of companies, financial institutions and government bodies during his long career. He was the 671st Lord Mayor of the City of London from 1998-99, during which time he famously spoke out against the UK joining the euro. He became a life peer in 1997 and is now chairman of Deutsche Bank’s European investment banking division. He is married with three children.