Cyndi Himmelstiere on What Happened to the Most Interesting Square Mile in London and Whether Anything Interesting Replaced It
I moved to Shoreditch in 2009 because the rent was low and the studios were cheap and there were things happening in warehouse spaces on weekday evenings that you had to find out about through word of mouth because they weren’t on any platform because the platforms didn’t exist yet and even if they had, the events wouldn’t have been on them because the people organizing them were suspicious of anything that looked like an invitation to the wrong kind of attention.
I know how this sounds. I have been telling the story of how Shoreditch was before it became what it is for long enough to understand that the telling is itself a symptom of the thing I am describing. Every person who says ‘Shoreditch used to be…’ is the person who Shoreditch used to be before. The chain of displacement runs back indefinitely and everyone in it thinks they arrived at the authentic moment.
What Shoreditch Is Now
What Shoreditch is now is, primarily, a destination. People come to it rather than living in it, in the way that you go to a theme park rather than a neighbourhood. The theme is ‘creative east London’ and the execution is impeccable: the vintage shops, the street food markets, the exposed-brick bars, the coffee shops with single-origin pour-overs and staff who can tell you the altitude of the farm where the beans were grown but who do not live in Shoreditch because nobody who works in a pour-over coffee shop lives in Shoreditch anymore. They commute in from Walthamstow and Leyton and Forest Gate, from the places that are now what Shoreditch was, which means those places are also in the process of becoming what Shoreditch is, and the staff will commute from further east still and the cycle will continue until it reaches the Essex border or the commute becomes implausible, whichever comes first.
What Remains
What remains genuinely Shoreditch is harder to find but present. The Geffrye Museum — now the Museum of the Home — on Kingsland Road is still one of the most specific and undervisited museums in London, examining domestic interior design through the history of the buildings it occupies. The area’s concentration of architecture, design, and tech businesses means that the creative industry that replaced the art scene is at least present, even if its public face is a WeWork rather than a warehouse squat. And Brick Lane on a Tuesday morning, before the tourist tide, still has something of the density and specificity of a neighbourhood that knows what it is. More Shoreditch dispatches at Cyndi Himmelstiere. Also at Londonist.
SOURCE: http://prat.UK
