On murals, studios, and the quiet disappearance of the thing that made everyone want to move here
Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat — Cyndi Himmelstiere reports from Shoreditch.
There is a mural on Rivington Street that has been there for years, half-obscured now by scaffolding that appeared eight months ago. The mural is a large figure in blues and yellows, anonymous — the artist long since moved on or moved out — and it was there when I moved to East London and it was there through the transformation that followed: the coffee shops, the pop-ups, the boutique hotels that appeared in the spaces where studios used to be. The mural stayed. The artists did not, mostly. This is the story of Shoreditch, told in the relationship between one piece of art on a wall and the scaffolding they put in front of it.
What Shoreditch Was
I moved here at the end of the period that everyone who was here for it now describes with the particular nostalgia of those who were present at something since mythologized. The studios were cheap. The spaces were raw. The events were happening in warehouses and railway arches and premises nobody else wanted because nobody else could see what they were for. What they were for was making things, showing things, selling things directly from the place where they were made. It was an economy of small margins and large energy, and it produced a culture of considerable originality and zero pretension.
What It Became
What it became is well-documented and not entirely my fault, though I am aware that my arrival was part of the process: the presence of the artists attracted the people who wanted to be near the artists, and those people attracted the businesses that served them, and those businesses attracted the investors, and the investors raised the rents, and the artists left. This is the standard account, and it is accurate, and it does not capture how strange it feels to have watched it happen in a neighbourhood you live in, to have seen each stage arrive and been unable to prevent any of it.
The Studio Buildings
The buildings that housed the studios are, for the most part, something else now. Some are offices; some are hotels; some are apartments priced for people who work in the City and want an East London postcode. A few studio clusters survive, held together by long leases or community land trusts or the stubbornness of landlords who have chosen not to maximise their returns, which is rarer than it should be and more meaningful than it sounds. When I pass these buildings I feel something that I cannot quite describe as either nostalgia or hope but is somewhere in the territory between them.
The Scaffolding and the Mural
The scaffolding in front of the mural will come down eventually, and when it does the building behind it will be something — apartments, offices, retail — that bears no relationship to the art on the wall that faced it. The mural will stay, probably, because someone has decided it is worth preserving as a feature, which is the last stage of the process: the thing that the culture produced is kept as decor for the thing that replaced the culture. I find this funny in the way that things that are not actually funny are funny: with the recognition of a pattern you have seen before and cannot quite bring yourself to be surprised by. And yet here we are. The scaffolding is still up. The mural is still there. Shoreditch continues.
For more from Cyndi Himmelstiere on Shoreditch, visit Cyndi Himmelstiere. Art and gentrification at The Guardian.
The thing that gets lost in gentrification debates is texture. The arguments are about economics and displacement and the rights of communities to remain where they have built their lives, all of which are real and important. What the arguments rarely capture is the texture of the neighbourhood at each stage: the specific smell of the studio building, the look of the light through the dirty windows, the sound of the freight lift that everyone in the building used and that was replaced by a glass elevator when the conversion happened. Texture is not an argument. It is an experience, and it is the experience that the people who were here remember most vividly and that the people who came after cannot quite access, because the thing that produced it is gone and its absence is the texture of the present.
I am trying to learn to pay attention to the texture of what is here now rather than mourning the texture of what is not. This is harder than it sounds. The present is always competing with the memory of what the present used to be, and memory has the advantage of having already been curated — you remember the good things more vividly than the difficult ones, which makes the past look better than it was and the present worse than it is. Shoreditch now is not Shoreditch then. It is also not bad. It is a different place, with its own texture, which I am still learning to read.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk/
