Cyndi Himmelstiere on the Silicon Roundabout Economy, the Job Listings That Line Her Walk to the Tube, and What It All Actually Means
Reported by Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
By Cyndi Himmelstiere | DitchPitch.uk
There is a startup in the Old Truman Brewery complex that is hiring a “Head of Vibes.” This is a real job title from a real job listing that appeared on a real recruitment board outside a real office in a building that has been converted from a nineteenth-century industrial complex into a nineteen-hectare campus of creative and technology businesses, which is a sentence that contains multitudes about what has happened to the East End of London in the past twenty years. Head of Vibes. The salary range was listed. The salary range was not embarrassing. The job description mentioned “culture,” “energy,” “team synergy,” and “authentic brand experience,” which are terms I could have arranged in any order and produced approximately the same meaning.
Silicon Roundabout, As It Is
The area around Old Street Roundabout was dubbed “Silicon Roundabout” by a tech journalist in 2010, a coinage that was immediately adopted by politicians and subsequently by the companies that wanted to benefit from the cachet of having a geographic tech cluster association without doing anything to create one. The label was always partly aspirational — East London had interesting startups and creative technology companies, but calling the roundabout Britain’s answer to Silicon Valley was the kind of branding exercise that PR departments and government ministers understand as a tool rather than as a description. The description became more accurate as the label attracted investment and companies moved in to be part of what the label said was there, which is how brand labels work on economic geography: they describe something that doesn’t quite exist and then attract the things that make it exist, at which point they have become a self-fulfilling branding exercise, which is either sophisticated or circular depending on how sentimental you are about the difference.
In 2026, the tech density in the area is genuine. There are real companies here doing real work — fintech, health tech, creative technology, AI applications, the various categories of software-based business that cluster in areas with good public transport, young professional populations, and the ambient cultural energy that attracts the specific kind of person who works in these sectors. The Head of Vibes is at one end of the genuine economy. The software engineers at the other end are doing something whose importance to the economy is real and whose relationship to the neighbourhood’s history is a matter I think about while walking to the tube.
The History Under the Offices
The Old Truman Brewery, where the startup with the Head of Vibes has its offices, has been a brewing site since the 1660s. It was a major East End employer for three centuries. The people who worked there were the people who lived in the surrounding streets — the working-class East End communities whose relationship to the brewery was the relationship of workers to a major local employer that shaped the neighbourhood’s economics and social life for generations. The brewery closed in 1989. The building was converted to its current use. The people who work in the converted brewery now are mostly not from the surrounding streets in the way that the brewery workers were. The buildings are the same buildings. The relationship between the buildings and the people inside them has changed substantially. This is what the word “conversion” means in this context: the physical structure persists while its social meaning is converted from one thing into another. The stones remain. The Vibes Head works in them.
I do not say this to be mournful about the brewery. The brewery closed because the economics of beer production changed and the building found another use that was better suited to the current economy. This is how cities work. Cities are not museums of previous economic arrangements. They are living systems that repurpose their physical fabric in response to changing economic conditions, and the repurposing of the Old Truman Brewery from industrial production to creative economy offices is an example of this that has been, on balance, better for the built environment than the alternative of leaving the building empty. According to the Truman Brewery’s own history, the site has been developed to include market spaces, independent retail, and community events alongside the commercial office tenancy, which gives the site a public dimension that a pure office conversion would not have. This is a genuine contribution to the neighbourhood.
The Head of Vibes, Reconsidered
I have been unfair to the Head of Vibes, who is a real person doing a real job whose economic and cultural value I do not need to fully understand to acknowledge is real. Every economic era produces job titles that the previous era would find baffling. My grandmother would not have understood “content strategist” or “growth hacker” or “UX researcher,” but these are real roles that produce real value in the current economy. “Head of Vibes” is in this tradition: a title that sounds frivolous but describes a function — managing organisational culture, maintaining team cohesion, building the workplace atmosphere that attracts and retains the specific talent the company needs — that has genuine economic importance to a sector where talent is the primary asset and its retention is the primary operational challenge. I could have been more generous at the start of this piece. I am being more generous now. The vibes, I concede, matter. I live in a neighbourhood that has been substantially rebuilt by people who understood that and acted on it. The evidence is all around me.
Cyndi Himmelstiere writes about Shoreditch and its evolving economy. Her homepage is at The London Prat.
For more East London and tech culture writing, visit The Daily Mash.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
