Skyscrapernews.com brings you this detailed model of Canary Wharf in London that you can download for Google Earth, giving you an opportunity to fly around the future skyline from the comfort of your own front room.

It features all the current completed buildings at the Canary Wharf estate including One Canada Square plus a number of planned buildings including Riverside South, North Quay, Arrowhead Quay and the under construction Pan Peninsula Towers.

In addition to this lot, we have now improved the model too and added more buildings. These are Ability Place, 41 Millharbour and the Crossharbour development. You can expect more buildings to be added in the future.

All the buildings come complete with textures for added realism and have been optimised with the minimum number of polygons and maximum number of shared textures to make them run as smoothly as possible.

The file will no doubt have other buildings added to it in the future that are set to be constructed in the area, plus a full set of place-marks if anyone here can be bothered to add them.

To use this file you need the latest Version 4 of Google Earth which you can download from http://earth.google.com because this model uses textures, a new addition. It will NOT work with Version 3 of Google Earth at all.

This also means you need a fairly bulky graphics card that has at least 64mb of memory, plenty of RAM and a decent CPU. We recommend a system with at least a geforce 5200, 512mb of RAM and a 1.5ghz processor or else it'll be chuggy at best.

We have the choice of two versions, 1.1 is the most up to date. To download either model from Skyscrapernews.com go here -

06/11/2006 - Version 1.1 (6.98 mb)
07/15/2006 - Version 1.0 (6.68 mb)

Just follow the instructions in the zip file to install this once you have it and if you have any further problems please refer to the readme.txt file included within for troubleshooting.

Remember, the model is distributed under a Creative Commons 2.5 Attribution plus Non Commercial License meaning you can use it for any non commercial use you wish as long as the author remains credited.