One of the country's largest office districts and some of London's oldest street markets sit two miles apart in the same borough. A customer searching your name needs to know which one you're in.

Tower Hamlets

From Canary Wharf's towers to Roman Road's market stalls, twenty places with twenty different trades, and an unusual number of ways to be mistaken for somewhere else.

The borough holds one of the country's largest office districts and some of London's oldest street markets within a couple of miles of each other. Canary Wharf's towers, including One Canada Square, which held the record for the UK's tallest building from 1991 to 2012, sit above five interconnected shopping malls built on a closed dock. A short distance away, Chrisp Street Market was designed by Frederick Gibberd and built for the 1951 Festival of Britain as the first purpose-built pedestrian shopping area in the United Kingdom, and Roman Road Market has traded since at least 1843. Further west, Old Spitalfields Market was licensed in 1638 and Petticoat Lane has traded from around 1608. These are not the same customer, and a website built for one reads as the wrong shop entirely to the other.

The borough's names are also unusually easy to confuse, including with itself. The Isle of Dogs is a peninsula name recorded since 1520 that had no official boundary until Tower Hamlets Council created the Isle of Dogs Neighbourhood in 1987, and it still covers three genuinely different places, Canary Wharf, Millwall and Cubitt Town, each with its own trade. Bow Common's own recorded history places it inside Mile End's old parish rather than Bow's. Ratcliff's parish was abolished in 1921 and merged into Limehouse, and no station or administrative area has carried the name since. Millwall F.C. was founded here in 1885 and left for New Cross in 1910, so a search for the name most people associate with the area returns a football club in another borough entirely.

The borough boundary adds a second layer of the same problem. Fish Island sits inside Tower Hamlets but is commonly mistaken for Hackney Wick, which is Hackney's. Victoria Park's eighty-six hectares are entirely within Tower Hamlets, in the Bow East ward, while the streets on its northern edge are in Hackney. Bromley-by-Bow faces Newham across the River Lea, with well-known landmarks on the far bank belonging to a different council. And Bow Church on Bow Road is not St Mary-le-Bow in the City of London, whatever the bells are supposed to mean. A business here is very often competing under a name that a customer's map app, or a customer's memory, has already put somewhere else. Fifty-eight conservation areas sit across the borough, protecting a great deal of that old fabric, but none of them tells a customer which side of a boundary you're actually trading on. The website is what does.