The Specific Quiet of an East London Neighbourhood Before Its Performance Day Begins
I walk early because it is the only hour at which Shoreditch is quiet in the specific sense of being unoccupied by the performance of being Shoreditch that the rest of the day requires. Not silent – there are lorries, and the delivery cyclists who treat red lights as advisory rather than mandatory, and the shutters going up on the shops that open at eight – but quiet in the sense of the neighbourhood not yet having been claimed by the day’s intentions for it. The street at seven is the street before its purpose has been assigned. It is not performing being Shoreditch. It is just being a street.
Brick Lane at seven has the air of a place recovering. The previous night’s boxes are being dealt with. The morning’s bagel shop, which never quite closes in the way that other establishments close, is already busy with the people who work in the market and the trades that make the neighbourhood function regardless of its cultural reputation. The graffiti that appeared overnight on the hoarding by the old brewery is being examined by someone with a phone. The street cleans itself slowly and incompletely, as cities do, and the morning light on the brick – the specific quality of horizontal early light on Victorian industrial brick that the photographers who come to photograph the neighbourhood are usually too late to find – is available for forty minutes before the angle changes and takes the quality with it. I have never photographed it. I look at it instead, which is the practice I recommend.
The People At This Hour
At seven in the morning you see the people for whom Shoreditch is not a destination but a place where they live and work at hours that the neighbourhood’s cultural reputation does not accommodate. The Bangladeshi community that predates the fashionable version of the street by several decades, using it in the morning as they have always used it, without reference to its reputation as anything other than their street. The builders at work on the inevitable renovation project, doing the physical work of constructing the spaces that will subsequently be used by people who will never meet them. The parents with children on the way to school through streets that are also, in the same postcode, occupied by apartments that cost more per night than those parents earn. MyLondon writes about Shoreditch as it presents itself from mid-morning onwards. The seven o’clock version is quieter and more real and I am not giving away which streets are best for it.
Why This Hour
I walk at seven because it shows me the neighbourhood without the mediation that the rest of the day applies to it – the reviews, the Instagram posts, the cultural commentary, the reputation management that any area with Shoreditch’s international profile necessarily generates. The unmediated neighbourhood is not more beautiful or more interesting than the curated version; it is more accurate, which is a different quality. The accuracy shows you things that the curation is designed to show you and also things that the curation omits: the small repairs, the unglamorous logistics, the specific human uses of the street that do not photograph well and therefore do not enter the representation. I am in Shoreditch because of the curation – the restaurants, the culture, the scene are the reason I am here. I stay because of the seven o’clock walk, which is what the curation is built on and what it cannot fully represent.
The neighbourhood continues to evolve in ways that reward sustained attention more than occasional visits. The people who notice the most interesting things happening in Shoreditch are the people who walk the same streets at different hours on different days and accumulate the observation over time, noticing what changes and what persists and what the changes reveal about the forces operating on the neighbourhood that a single visit cannot show. This is the slow work of paying attention to a place, and it is available to anyone willing to do it consistently. The neighbourhood rewards the consistent attention with a kind of legibility that the occasional visitor never achieves, and that legibility is worth more than any single review of any single restaurant or venue, because it gives you the frame in which the individual things make sense.
The early morning walk also produces a relationship with the neighbourhood that the late morning and afternoon and evening visits cannot replicate, because it is sustained over time in a way that single visits are not. You walk the same streets at the same hour on different days and you accumulate observations: which buildings are being renovated this week, which shop has changed its window display, where the new graffiti has appeared and how long it lasts before it is painted over or supplemented. This accumulation is the slow work of knowing a place rather than visiting it, and the distinction between knowing and visiting is the distinction between having a relationship with a neighbourhood and consuming it, which is the distinction that matters most to the people who live there.
Shoreditch rewards the slow work. The neighbourhood that reveals itself at seven in the morning over a period of months is more interesting and more true than the neighbourhood that presents itself on a Saturday afternoon for the benefit of visitors, and the early morning version is available to anyone willing to set an alarm and arrive before the performance begins. I recommend it without reservation. The streets are empty. The light is correct. The neighbourhood is itself.
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