Cyndi Himmelstiere Conducts an Investigation Into the Shipping Container Commercial Space That Is Always Full and Never Quite Explains Itself
Written by Cyndi Himmelstiere for Bohiney Magazine, republished by The London Prat. Cyndi writes about Shoreditch from inside Shoreditch, which is both the advantage and the problem.
Boxpark Shoreditch is a collection of shipping containers that have been converted into retail and food units and arranged in a configuration that produces a commercial environment that is outdoors but sheltered, branded but independent-feeling, and very popular at all hours that I have attempted to walk through it on the way to somewhere else. It has been open since 2011. I have been in Shoreditch for three years. I have walked past Boxpark approximately three hundred times. I have been inside approximately forty of those times, primarily to use the food units and once to buy a T-shirt that I wore once and then felt complicated about. I still do not understand what Boxpark is trying to be, and I am aware that this may be a limitation of my understanding rather than a limitation of Boxpark’s concept.
The concept, as I understand it from its own materials, is “a curated mix of fashion, lifestyle, and food brands in an innovative shipping container pop-up mall.” This description is accurate in the sense that there are shipping containers, that they contain fashion, lifestyle, and food businesses, and that the combination is curated to a degree. The “pop-up” element is now fourteen years old, which is not the typical timeframe of a pop-up anything, which suggests that Boxpark is either the world’s longest-running pop-up or has quietly become a permanent retail format that retains the pop-up branding because the branding is part of the value proposition. I believe the latter. The shipping containers are not going anywhere. They have been there since 2011. They are not a pop-up. They are a permanent retail environment in the specific format of a temporary retail environment. This is a successful piece of branding and also a mild philosophical paradox.
Who Actually Goes to Boxpark
The people who use Boxpark are: tourists who have been told it is the Shoreditch experience and who are discovering that the Shoreditch experience includes queuing for ramen next to a man wearing a T-shirt that costs one hundred and twenty pounds; local residents who use the food units because they are convenient and the food is good; and people who are waiting for something else in the area and need somewhere to be that is not a coffee shop, because they have already been to a coffee shop and do not need more coffee. The three populations coexist in Boxpark at all hours without apparent conflict, which is either because Boxpark has designed a space that serves all three simultaneously or because Shoreditch has made its residents sufficiently flexible that they can share commercial space with people who are there for completely different reasons without finding this awkward.
The T-Shirt and What It Means
The T-shirt I bought at Boxpark cost fifty pounds, which is fifty pounds more than I usually spend on T-shirts and approximately forty-eight pounds more than I would have spent if I had not been in Boxpark on a Sunday afternoon with nothing specific to do and a credit card that I was not monitoring as carefully as I should have been. The T-shirt is white. It has a small graphic on the chest that means something within a specific cultural reference framework that I was aware of at the time of purchase and less certain about now. I wore it once to a bar in Shoreditch where two people asked me where I got it. I said Boxpark. They nodded. The nodding contained an opinion that I could not fully interpret. The T-shirt is in the back of my wardrobe. Boxpark is still there. I still pass it three hundred times a year. I have not bought another T-shirt. According to TimeOut London, Boxpark remains one of Shoreditch’s most visited commercial attractions. NewsThump covers pop-up retail formats that have been operating for fourteen years without apparent irony.
The Future of Boxpark
Boxpark Shoreditch is reportedly planning an expansion or refurbishment. The details are not public yet, and Cyndi has been unable to confirm the specifics beyond the fact that the shipping containers appear to be receiving some maintenance attention that is more significant than routine upkeep. If Boxpark expands, it will either become more of what it currently is, which is a curated commercial space in a temporary format that has become permanent, or it will become something different, which is the Shoreditch trajectory for all spaces that survive long enough to need to become something different. Cyndi will cover the expansion when it is announced. She will also cover the T-shirt situation if the new units include fashion brands in the fifty-pound range, because she is still thinking about the last one and whether the regret is about the price or the graphic.
The T-shirt in the back of the wardrobe represents a specific category of Shoreditch consumer experience: the purchase that felt right in the context of the neighbourhood and slightly puzzling outside it. Shoreditch has a specific purchasing atmosphere created by the combination of interesting spaces, confident aesthetics, and the ambient sense that everyone around you knows what they are doing. This produces a temporary confidence in your own decision-making that does not always survive the return home. Cyndi does not regret the T-shirt exactly. She regrets the fifty pounds less than she expected to, which is either evidence that the T-shirt was worth it or evidence that she has absorbed enough of Shoreditch aesthetic confidence to have made peace with the purchase. Either way the T-shirt is in the wardrobe. Boxpark is still there. No further purchases are planned.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
