Canary Wharf is one of the most demanding environments in London to carry out dilapidations and Cat A reinstatement works. The estate is tightly managed, the buildings are tall, the tenants are large, and the rules — from access permits to waste routes to permitted working hours — leave no margin for a contractor who doesn’t know the estate inside out.
London Dilaps is a specialist dilapidations and office strip out contractor delivering lease-end works across Canary Wharf and the wider E14 district. We work to the estate’s management standards, handle the full permit and induction process, coordinate goods lift and loading bay bookings with the building, and return offices to landlord-specification Cat A condition on time and on budget.
Whether you’re handing back a mid-rise floor in a Cabot Square tower or a full-floor Cat A across a Bank Street building, our team has delivered something very similar before. Every project is priced directly against the served schedule, managed by a named project lead, and handed back with zero retained items and a signed-off estate walk-round.
Every contractor entering Canary Wharf has to be registered with the estate, inducted and issued with permits-to-work before setting foot on a client floor. Method statements, RAMS, insurance certificates, fire impairment notices and waste carrier documentation are all checked before access is granted, and this process needs to start weeks before the first tool is lifted. We handle the full estate registration and induction pack on your behalf, so the building management team hears from us when we’re ready to deliver, not when we’re still chasing paperwork. Getting compliance right at the start is the fastest way to avoid programme slippage later.
Canary Wharf is vertical, and that changes everything about how a programme runs. Goods lifts are booked by slot, often weeks in advance, and shared with other tenants and trades working in the same building. Skips are generally not permitted on the estate, so all arisings have to be managed through the service roads and loading bays on time-booked slots. A strip-out can stand or fall on how well the lift and loading logistics are managed — more than on the physical works themselves. We treat logistics as the first item on the programme, not an afterthought, which is why our Canary Wharf projects tend to finish on the day they were meant to.
Noisy works across Canary Wharf are almost always restricted to evenings, weekends or overnight. Strip-out, ceiling grid removal, core drilling and partition knock-downs can’t run during occupied hours in most towers, and the exact permitted window varies building by building. Some floors allow 7pm–11pm weekday working with Saturday daytime; others are overnight-only. Planning the programme around the window — rather than the other way around — is the single biggest factor in delivering on time on the estate. We confirm the permitted hours with the building manager before pricing, so the quote and the programme both reflect what’s actually achievable on your floor.
A recent Canary Wharf project: a financial services tenant handing back a 9,200 sq ft mid-rise floor in a Cabot Square tower. The schedule required full strip-out of a heavily customised fit-out including a two-storey internal staircase cut through the slab by a previous tenant, reinstatement of the raised floor and Cat A ceiling grid, re-commissioning of the FCU network, and a full redecoration. All noisy works were restricted to 7pm–11pm weekdays and 8am–6pm Saturdays. Programme: six weeks on site, delivered to a signed-off landlord walk-round with zero retained items. That mix of scope, spec and logistics is typical Canary Wharf work.
London Dilaps is a specialist dilapidations and Cat A reinstatement contractor with a proven track record on the Canary Wharf estate. We hold the insurance, accreditations and documentation needed to register on the estate and complete the full induction and permit process, and we work to each building’s exact Cat A specification — not an “equivalent to” approach that would be rejected at handover. Our programmes are built around the logistics realities of tower working: lift bookings, loading slots, out-of-hours windows and estate-wide rules on noise and waste.
Our teams cover the full Canary Wharf estate and the surrounding E14 district, including One Canada Square, Cabot Square, Canada Square, Bank Street, Heron Quays, Churchill Place, Westferry Circus, the Wood Wharf development, South Quay and the wider Isle of Dogs. Every project is priced directly against the served schedule and handed back with zero retained items.
We’re happy to attend a pre-quote site walk-round on the estate, especially where the schedule is long or the programme is tight.
If you’ve been served a schedule of dilapidations at the end of your Canary Wharf lease, we can price every item against the schedule and deliver the works needed to discharge your obligations. We cover the full scope — redecorations, floor repairs, partition removal, Cat A reinstatement and M&E re-commissioning — and work with your own surveyor to push back on items that aren’t your contractual responsibility. The goal is a clean handover on the estate with a final account that matches the original quote, not one that balloons in the last two weeks.
Canary Wharf Cat A specifications are some of the tightest in London — ceiling grids, floor boxes, carpet tiles, blinds, lighting and finishes all have to match the landlord’s exact spec, not “equivalent to”. We return your floor to the building’s base-build condition using approved materials sourced through the right suppliers, re-commission the M&E, and produce the test certificates and O&M documentation the managing agent will ask for at sign-off. Whether you’re handing back a single floor or a full multi-floor tenancy, we deliver Cat A reinstatement that passes inspection first time.
Before Cat A reinstatement can start, the tenant fit-out has to come out — and on Canary Wharf, that’s a logistics exercise as much as a construction one. Our strip out service removes partitions, glazing, kitchenettes, joinery, IT and AV, floor boxes and bespoke features, with all arisings routed through the estate’s service roads and loading bays rather than kerbside skips. We handle goods lift slot bookings, out-of-hours access, method statements and waste documentation — every moving part that makes tower strip-outs harder than ground-floor ones. The floor is left clean and ready for reinstatement to start on schedule.
Our Canary Wharf teams can mobilise quickly for time-critical lease-end projects — call us to discuss your programme today.