[2] Some of the tallest buildings in London occupy Canary Wharf, one of the country's largest financial districts, in the southeast of the borough.

Demographically, Tower Hamlets has a large population of British Bangladeshis, forming the largest single ethnic group in the borough at 32%.

[7] Whitechapel and Brick Lane's restaurants, neighbouring street market and shops provide the largest range of Bangladeshi cuisine, woodwork, carpets and clothes in Europe.

This covered a wider area than the present-day borough, and its military relationship with the Tower is thought to have been several centuries earlier than the 1554 record.

[16] The area was once characterised by rural settlements clustered around the City walls or along the main roads, surrounded by farmland, with marshes and small communities by the River, serving the needs of shipping and the Royal Navy.

Successive waves of foreign immigration began with Huguenot refugees creating a new extramural suburb in Spitalfields in the 17th century.

Aerial bombing in World War II devastated much of the East End, with its docks, railways and industry forming a continual target.

In the separate boroughs making up today's Tower Hamlets a total of 2,221 civilians were killed and 7,472 were injured, with 46,482 houses destroyed and 47,574 damaged.

The Canary Wharf development, improved infrastructure, and the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park[22] mean that the East End is undergoing further change, but some of its districts continue to see some of the worst poverty in Britain.

The liberty appears to have arisen from much older obligations on inhabitants of the area to provide military service to the Constable of the Tower of London.

It was a merger of the old boroughs of Bethnal Green, Poplar and Stepney, and was named Tower Hamlets after the historic liberty.

Areas within the borough include: The Canary Wharf complex within Docklands on the Isle of Dogs forms a group of some of the tallest buildings in Europe.

These are: The data below were taken between 1971 and 2000 at the weather station in Greenwich, around 1 mile (1.6 km) south of the borough's former town hall, at Mulberry Place: By 1891, Tower Hamlets – roughly the ancient civil parish of Stepney – was already one of the most populated areas in London.

The building of the docks intensified land use and caused the last marshy areas in the south of the parish to be drained for housing and industry.

The construction of the railways caused many more displaced people to settle in the area, and a massive influx of Eastern European Jews at the latter part of the nineteenth century added to the population growth.

This migration peaked at the end of that century and population growth entered a long decline through to the 1960s, as people moved away eastwards to newer suburbs of London and Essex.

The metropolitan boroughs suffered very badly during World War II, during which considerable numbers of houses were destroyed or damaged beyond use due to heavy aerial bombing.

[37] This decline began to reverse with the establishment of the London Docklands Development Corporation bringing new industries and housing to the brownfield sites along the river.

[41][42] A smaller proportion are of Black African and Caribbean descent (7%),[41] with Somalis representing the second-largest minority ethnic group.

In 2018, Tower Hamlets had the lowest life expectancy and the highest rate of heart disease of all London boroughs, along with Newham.

[60][61][62] The East London Mosque has been visited by several notable people, including Prince Charles, Boris Johnson, many foreign government officials and world-renowned imams and Muslim scholars.

[65] Canary Wharf is home to the many of the world and European headquarters of numerous major banks and professional services firms including Barclays, Citigroup, Clifford Chance, Credit Suisse, Infosys, Fitch Ratings, HSBC, J.P. Morgan, KPMG, MetLife, Morgan Stanley, RBC, Skadden, State Street and Thomson Reuters.

[66] Savills, a top-end estate agency recommends that 'extreme luxury' and ultra-modern residential properties are to be found at Canary Riverside, West India Quay, Pan Peninsula and Neo Bankside.

Tower Hamlets is the earliest borough where the first skyscrapers were built and since 2014 it saw the completion of over seventy skyscrapers, more than any other place in the UK [67] The End Child Poverty coalition published that Tower Hamlets has the highest proportion of children in poverty of any local authority in the UK at 49% (and as high as 54.5% in the Bethnal Green South ward).

[83] The council runs several Idea Stores in the borough, which combine traditional library and computer services with other resources, and are designed to attract more diverse members.

York Hall is also a regular venue for boxing tournaments, and in May 2007 a public spa was opened in the building's renovated Victorian-style Turkish baths.

One of the smallest at 1.19 ha is the decorative Grove Hall Park off Fairfield Road, Bow, which was once the site of a lunatic asylum.

The East London Line passes from north to south through Tower Hamlets with stations at Whitechapel, Shadwell and Wapping.

The manor and parish did not have a coat of arms but the (smaller) subsequent Metropolitan Borough of Stepney did, and elements from that have been incorporated into the current design.

This was a development of the previous logo of the White Tower, in mulberry and presented in a three-tower form, as if seen from certain quarters which obscured the furthest corner tower—and a geographically accurate representation of the local part of the Thames.