Cyndi Himmelstiere Talks to the People Who Were Here Before the Exposed Brick and Asks What They Actually Think About What Happened
The people who were in Shoreditch before Shoreditch became the thing that people come to Shoreditch to experience are not difficult to find if you know which pubs to sit in at which times of day and can sustain a conversation without looking at your phone, which turns out to be the primary filter. I found three of them over the course of a month, drinking in establishments that have so far survived the wave of concept bar openings around them by the simple mechanism of not changing anything and serving the regulars who have been coming for decades in a quiet act of institutional resistance that the concept bars will eventually outlast financially but have not outlasted yet.
Terry, sixty-seven, has lived in a council flat on Old Street since 1981 and has watched the neighbourhood change from a manufacturing district to a creative quarter to a tech hub to a destination with the detached observation of someone who has long since resolved not to be upset by things he cannot control. ‘It’s fine,’ he told me, over a pint of Guinness at eleven in the morning, which is not a judgment because Terry works nights. ‘Different people. Same streets. Streets don’t care. I care a bit. But less than I used to. You run out of caring about streets eventually.’
Pat’s View
Pat, seventy-three, ran a pie and mash shop near Liverpool Street until the lease expired in 2019 and was not renewed at a price she could manage. She was more specific in her feelings. ‘The people who took my shop make coffee,’ she said. ‘Not bad coffee. Good coffee, actually. I’ve tried it. But my customers had nowhere to go after I closed because my customers do not spend four pounds on a flat white. The coffee shop is for different customers. Different customers are fine. I just wish my customers had somewhere to go.’ Pat’s customers now travel to Bethnal Green for pie and mash. The journey takes twenty minutes. Several of them make it regularly. The pie is worth twenty minutes, apparently, and has been for a long time, and will be when the coffee shop has become something else and its customers are telling someone what Shoreditch used to be like.
More East London oral history at Cyndi Himmelstiere.
SOURCE: http://prat.UK
