Cyndi Himmelstiere on the Shoreditch Creative Economy, What Happens When a Neighbourhood’s Art Infrastructure Loses to Its Wellness Infrastructure, and Personal Growth
Reported by Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
By Cyndi Himmelstiere | DitchPitch.uk
There was a gallery two streets from my flat that showed work by emerging artists, charged no admission, operated on the specific financial model of passionate underfunding that sustains much of London’s independent art infrastructure, and hosted an opening night every six weeks or so at which you could see genuinely interesting work and drink passable wine from a trestle table and talk to people who were thinking about things in ways that were interesting to encounter. It is now a gym. A particular variety of boutique gym that charges a per-session fee that exceeds the gallery’s monthly art materials budget and that has installed floor-to-ceiling windows so that the people inside can be seen exercising by the people outside, which is either a design choice that reflects a specific understanding of the relationship between fitness and public visibility or is an accident of the original building’s architecture that the gym has decided to embrace rather than obscure. Either way: the gallery is gone, the gym is there, and I walk past it every morning on my way to the coffee shop with the specific expression of someone who has not handled this transition maturely and has no immediate plans to do so.
Why the Gallery Closed
The gallery closed because the lease ended and the landlord chose not to renew it at a rate the gallery could afford. This is the standard sequence of events when creative spaces disappear from gentrifying neighbourhoods, and it is a sequence that is documented with increasing precision by organisations including the Mayor of London’s office, which has been tracking the loss of creative space in the capital for years and producing reports whose findings are accurate and whose recommendations have been implemented at a scale insufficient to reverse the trend. The gallery had been in the space for nine years. Nine years is a meaningful tenure in the London creative space ecology. The gallery was good. The landlord made a calculation. The gym arrived. The calculation was, from the landlord’s perspective, straightforward: a gym operation can pay more per square metre than a gallery operating on arts council grants and private donations, because gyms sell access to equipment and instruction at per-session rates that galleries cannot match and because wellness spending in London has been growing at rates that art attendance has not matched in comparable income demographics.
I understand the economics. I do not have to like the outcomes the economics produce, and I do not, and I have been told by people I respect that the mature response to watching creative spaces close is to support the ones that remain rather than to stand outside gyms emitting the specific energy of someone composing a column about it. I am supporting the ones that remain. I am also composing the column.
What Is Actually Lost
The gallery provided something that the gym does not and cannot provide, which is a space for encountering work that you did not know you needed to encounter and that changes how you think about something in ways you did not anticipate. This is the specific cultural function of a gallery that shows work outside the mainstream of what galleries that can afford West End real estate show: it is the infrastructure for the discovery of things that have not yet been validated by the market or the establishment, and that infrastructure is what East London built its creative reputation on and is what is being systematically lost as the economics of the neighbourhood shift toward uses that pay market rent. The artists who showed at the gallery that is now a gym are showing somewhere else, or are not showing, or have moved to a cheaper city, or are making work in their flats and not showing it anywhere. The art exists or does not exist in the world regardless of the gallery. But the gallery was the mechanism by which it became public, and the mechanism matters as much as the content it carries.
According to the Greater London Authority‘s cultural infrastructure reports, London has lost a significant proportion of its affordable creative workspace over the past decade. The Mayor’s office has implemented various cultural space protection policies including the Creative Land Trust, which acquires and holds affordable creative workspace in perpetuity to protect it from the market pressures that have closed places like the gallery near my flat. The Trust is real and is doing valuable work. It is working at a scale that is insufficient for the total loss, which continues at a rate that the Trust’s acquisitions do not fully offset. The gym is good for the people who use it. The gallery was better for the neighbourhood. Both things are true and the neighbourhood now has the gym and not the gallery, which is where the truth leaves us.
Cyndi Himmelstiere writes about Shoreditch’s cultural life and its disappearance. Her homepage is at The London Prat.
For more on creative spaces, gentrification, and the gym, visit The Daily Mash.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
