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With its tree-lined embankments, imperial parks and palaces, its ancient abbeys and cathedrals, its monuments, museums and centuries-old highways and byways, London has long been celebrated for its walks, every step of the way as richly furnished with anecdote as it is with views.

Since its founding days as Roman Londinium the last 2000 years have bestowed not only great prosperity but a cityscape that tugs at the heartstrings of all who live there and all those who yearn to visit. Here, in a rich abundance, are Sir Charles Barry and Augustus Pugin's Palace of Westminster, mother of all parliaments; Sir Christopher Wren's hallowed St Paul's Cathedral and the gothic fastness of Henry Yevele's Westminster Abbey. Here are the stuccoed classical facades of John Nash's Regent's Park, the wide ceremonial acres of William Kent's Horse Guards Parade and, across Whitehall, Inigo Jones's renaissance-style Banqueting House - all grand monuments to inspired architectural genius. But as the new millenium dawns a new contender is preparing to step into the ring.

Where Pugin, Nash, Wren and Jones once played with their building bricks, a new school of architecture and a new breed of designer have taken over the playground. These postmodern masters - like Norman Foster, César Pelli, I.M. Pei and the Chicago-based architects Skidmore Owings & Merrill - are all intent on marking London's landscape with their own particular brand of architectural bravado. But with little room left for commercial development in the heart of the capital, where space and planning permission exert equal restraint, they have looked east to London's redundant docklands which, for the last 40 years, have clung forlornly to the river that once brought such wealth to this city.

Canary Wharf is the most ambitious development in London's docklands. Only twenty minutes by Underground from London's West End, this major financial and business centre is moored like some mini-Manhattan in the heart of the Isle of Dogs. Named after the kennels where Henry VIII kept his hunting dogs in the sixteenth century and bounded by an extravagant loop in the River Thames, this tear-drop peninsular was never more than simple grazing land and as late as the mid-eighteenth century boasted only a single farmhouse in its interior and a few wharves and slipways along its bank. According to the architect Sir Christopher Wren, the only thing it had in its favour was the view it afforded of the domes and colonnades he had designed for the Greenwich Hospital on the south bank of the Thames.

But all that changed in 1799, when developers petitioned the authorities for permission to build the West India Docks, a secure, non-tidal basin where merchant ships bringing coffee, rum, sugar and hardwoods from the West Indies could be safely berthed and serviced. Canary Wharf was its central quay, the bustling, prosperous heart of a colonial trading empire on which the sun never set.

And that's how it remained until Hitler's bombers devastated the Isle of Dogs in the 1940 Blitz and shipping's post-war move to containerization saw the West India Docks fall into decline. It was only in 1987, when the Canadian construction company Olympia & York, responsible for a similar style of construction at The World Financial Centre in New York's Battery Park, was given the go-ahead to continue earlier attempts at redevelopment that life returned to this wasteland of windswept quays, idle cranes, rusting machinery and echoing warehouses.

Most visitors arrive at the new Canary Wharf either by means of the elevated Docklands Light Railway or the Jubilee Line, both extensions of the London Underground system. But these bring you into the centre of the development where it's easy to lose your bearings in the multi-level shopping malls that comprise midtown Canary Wharf. Better by far to begin your exploration at Westferry Circus on the western bank of the Isle of Dogs, where the redevelopment first began and where the latest Four Seasons Hotel rises above both riverside and wharf.

Surrounded by trees and a double ring of shaded promenades, laid to lawn and spilling over with blooms, it's hard to comprehend that Westferry Circus effectively controls the flow of traffic into and out of the Isle of Dogs and up onto the Canary Wharf ramp. Built high above the original quay, enclosed by neatly clipped hedges and decorated with free-form entrance gates and railings designed by Giuseppe Lund, this peaceful, pastoral space cleverly conceals the tunnelled rush of traffic that swirls beneath it, an intimately-proportioned park that overlooks not only the broad western reaches of the Thames but leads the way east, via West India Avenue, onto Canary Wharf itself.

With only the north side of this avenue developed so far, keep to the right-hand sidewalk when you leave Westferry Circus for your first glimpse of water and to better appreciate the interlocking eight- to ten-storey neo-classic facades that rise above the avenue's central parade of lime trees. Though it's no Piccadilly or Champs Elysees, there's still something triumphal about this necessarily narrow and foreshortened avenue, leading as it does into Cabot Square, the heart of the Canary Wharf development.

Even when it's crowded with lunch-hour strollers and sandwich-toting workers, Cabot Square has a light and airy elegance, its raised central piazza edged by a double row of lime trees and styled on a traditional London square with flower beds, fountain and stepped cascades, whose rush of water deadens the sound of passing traffic. This is a perfect spot to draw breath - and promptly lose it as you take in the Square's four signature buildings, their lofty ramparts fitted into each corner like elaborately mismatched bookends: I.M. Pei's eighteen-storey Credit Suisse building with its silver limestone cladding; the ox-blood granite bulk of Morgan Stanley's headquarters, designed by Skidmore Owings & Merrill and inspired by the 19th-century warehouses that once stood here; SOM's classically pedimented Barclays Bank in the north-east corner with its street-level arcades and wood-bowed shopfronts; and the Vermont-marble extension designed by Kohn Pederson Fox for Morgan Stanley curving away to the southern quayside like the flank of a glistening iceberg.

Threading your way between the Lexus, Daimler and Mercedes limousines triple-parked and panting importantly outside their entrances, leave Cabot Square on its north side and follow Wren Landing down to Fisherman's Walk, a tree-shaded esplanade overlooking the old West India Import Dock where goods were once stored in bond for Customs clearance. On the far side of this broad stretch of water jackhammers and piledrivers rattle away on a swathe of residential development around the new Dockland Museum.

Passing beneath the elevated tracks of the Docklands Railway and the arching steel and glass canopy that covers Canary Wharf station, duck up Frobisher Passage, turn left onto the North Colonnade and make for Canada Square, where I.M. Pei's monolithic Canary Tower reaches 800 feet into the sky. Four-square and pyramid-topped, clad in a cambric-finish sheath of silvery stainless steel, it's the tallest building in Britain and, were it not for the flight paths of the nearby City Airport, could easily have been the tallest in Europe.

With a nod to the canted, canary-yellow masts and tent-like canopy of Richard Rogers's £760 million Millennium Dome a mile or so distant across the river, turn south past the curved blue bulk of Sir Norman Foster's Citibank, stroll across Jubilee Park between the raised glass cupolas of the Underground station and head back along Heron Quay. Looking north from here, you suddenly find yourself far enough away from Canary Wharf to gain some sense of perspective, its long, looming wall of steel, stone and glass reflected in the still waters of the old West India Export Dock, where merchant ships bound for the colonies were once provisioned. Close your eyes, when the wind picks up and shimmies over its surface, and you'll maybe hear the creak of timber and the snap and furl of canvas. Open them again, and you'll certainly see the future.

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