Cyndi Himmelstiere on Silicon Roundabout, the Startups That Moved In, and Whether the Neighbourhood and the Industry Have Anything to Say to Each Other
The rebranding of Old Street Roundabout as ‘Silicon Roundabout’ was announced by David Cameron in 2010 in a manner that was enthusiastically adopted by the tech press and received by the people who actually worked and lived around Old Street with the specific London response to being branded by a politician — a mixture of mild irritation and the recognition that the branding would not affect daily life in any meaningful way regardless of whether you endorsed it. The name stuck in press releases and funding announcements. The roundabout remained the roundabout.
Fifteen years later the tech cluster is real even if the name is embarrassing. The concentration of technology companies — from startups operating from serviced offices in converted railway arches to the London offices of global technology businesses that chose East London for the talent, the transport links, and the rents that were lower than the West End at the moment of decision and are now not significantly lower but involve leases signed before that became apparent — has transformed the employment character of the neighbourhood without transforming its physical character in obvious ways unless you count the standing desks visible through the ground-floor windows of buildings whose previous tenants did not have standing desks because their jobs did not permit standing still long enough.
What the Workers Think
I spent a week talking to people who work in the Old Street tech cluster about their relationship to the neighbourhood around them. The responses varied. Several said they had moved to East London because of the job and had found the neighbourhood genuinely interesting in ways they had not expected. Several said they commuted in from other parts of London and experienced the immediate area primarily as the space between the tube station and the office. A smaller number said they were aware of the irony of working in an industry that accelerates gentrification while living in a neighbourhood that is being gentrified and that they thought about this occasionally without having arrived at a satisfactory response. This is, I think, the honest position. More from me at Cyndi Himmelstiere. Also Londonist.
SOURCE: http://prat.UK
