Cyndi Himmelstiere on the strange middle age of the shipping-container retail mall, the curious half-life of the word disruptive, and the question of what comes after
I walked past the Boxpark on Wednesday afternoon and counted, by my own admittedly informal survey, eleven empty units. The Boxpark, for those of you not in this corner of the borough, is the substantial pop-up retail mall built out of stacked shipping containers at the western end of Bethnal Green Road, which opened, with substantial fanfare, in 2011. Building on my earlier dispatches at Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat, I want to write today about what it means that the Boxpark, fifteen years on, looks substantially less full than it used to.
The Original Pitch
The Boxpark, when it opened, was sold to the public as a substantial reinvention of the retail format. The shipping containers, the founders argued, were a substantially more flexible and substantially cheaper way to provide retail space than conventional shop fronts. The flexibility was supposed to allow young brands to test the East London market without committing to a five-year lease. The cheapness was supposed to keep rents at a level that would, in turn, allow young brands to actually be able to afford the unit.
According to The Evening Standard, recent reporting on the Shoreditch retail economy has documented the substantial pressures facing pop-up retail formats across the UK in the past several years. The pressures, observers argue, reflect substantial cumulative effects of multiple factors, including substantial high-street footfall declines, substantial e-commerce expansion, and substantial cost pressures on young brand operations.
What Happened
What happened, in essence, is that the original pitch did not entirely survive its own success. The shipping containers became, over the years, substantially less cheap. The rents rose. The young brands that were supposed to test the East London market discovered that the rent levels at the Boxpark were, in many cases, comparable to the rent levels at conventional shop fronts in the surrounding streets. The flexibility that was supposed to be the principal value proposition became, in practice, a less compelling argument when the price had risen to the level of the alternatives.
The brands that did, in the end, take the units were, in the substantial majority of cases, food and drink operators rather than retail brands. The Boxpark became, over time, less a retail mall and more a substantial food court with some retail attached. This is not, in itself, a failure. A food court is a perfectly respectable thing. It is, however, a substantially different thing from what was originally proposed.
The Pandemic Question
The pandemic, dear reader, did substantial damage. The Boxpark, like substantial portions of the broader London hospitality economy, lost substantial trade across the substantial closures of 2020 and 2021. According to The Guardian, recent research on London hospitality has documented that substantial portions of the post-pandemic recovery have been substantially uneven, with some neighbourhoods recovering substantially faster than others, and some venues recovering substantially faster than others within those neighbourhoods.
The Boxpark, as a venue, recovered. The food vendors largely came back. The Friday night crowd, in particular, has, by my own observation, substantially returned. The empty units I counted on Wednesday afternoon are, in the typical case, not the result of pandemic-era casualties that have not yet been backfilled. They are the result of a substantial structural pressure on the format itself, which the pandemic accelerated but did not, in important respects, cause.
The Comparison Question
I have written before, in my previous columns on East London retail, about the substantial difference between the Boxpark and the Old Street roundabout development that opened a decade later, which absorbed substantial portions of the substantial young-brand and food-and-drink market that had previously gravitated towards Boxpark. The Old Street development is, in substantial respects, the Boxpark argument upgraded: the units are larger, the configuration is more flexible, the surrounding pedestrian environment is substantially better.
The Boxpark, in 2026, has to compete not just with conventional retail but with substantially better executed pop-up developments that have, in important respects, learned from the original Boxpark and improved on it. This is, in a market economy, a normal thing. Innovations get superseded by their successors. The Boxpark is, in this sense, the victim of its own influence.
The Wider Question
The Boxpark question is, in my view, an instance of a wider question that hangs over substantial portions of the East London retail economy: what happens to the substantial number of regeneration-era retail formats that, in their first decade, succeeded as substantial drivers of footfall, and that, in their second decade, are now competing with substantially better-funded successor formats while still occupying the same physical infrastructure?
The answer, I suspect, is that some of them will adapt and some of them will not. The Boxpark management has, in recent years, indicated that substantial reconfiguration is on the table. The question of what reconfiguration looks like is, however, substantially constrained by the physical reality that the venue is, in the end, a stack of shipping containers, and that there is only so much you can do with a stack of shipping containers.
What I Hope
I hope, dear reader, that the Boxpark survives, in some form. I hope this not because I am a particular fan of any individual unit, although I have, over fifteen years, eaten many serviceable lunches there, but because the Boxpark is, in important respects, a piece of Shoreditch civic memory. It is the place where the substantial East London regeneration of the early 2010s was, in many ways, first physically expressed. It is the place where a substantial number of small brands, between 2011 and 2018, found their first audience.
The thing that succeeds the Boxpark, whatever it is, will not, by definition, have that history. The history is not nothing. In a borough that has, in fifteen years, lost substantial portions of its built character, the things that remain become, by their very persistence, increasingly valuable.
What I Will Do
I will, this Saturday, go to the Boxpark. I will, deliberately, eat at one of the units that looked, on Wednesday, as though it might be among the next eleven to go empty. I will, deliberately, pay in cash. This is, I am aware, the absolute floor of civic engagement. It is not, however, nothing.
For more of my dispatches from this end of the borough, you can find me at my page on The London Prat.
For satirical takes on retail-as-cultural-question, see Private Eye.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
