An anatomy of the most self-conscious square mile in Britain, where authenticity is the most carefully manufactured product of all
I write about Shoreditch for Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat, which is a bit like being the official biographer of a person who insists they hate being photographed while standing very still in good lighting.
Shoreditch is the most self-conscious square mile in Britain, a neighbourhood that has built its entire identity on the careful performance of not caring about its identity. Everything here is effortless, and the effort required to achieve that effortlessness is colossal. The artfully unkempt beard. The deliberately battered furniture in the deliberately bare cafe. The vintage clothing curated with a rigour that would shame a museum. Authenticity, in Shoreditch, is the most carefully manufactured product on the market.
The Economics Of Effortlessness
Consider the cafe. It will have exposed brick, because exposing brick that was previously, sensibly, covered, costs money and signals that one values the appearance of decay over the comfort of plaster. It will have mismatched chairs, sourced at considerable expense to look as though they were found in a skip. It will serve coffee with the solemnity of a religious rite, and it will charge accordingly. The whole effect is one of careless authenticity, and the carelessness is the most expensive thing in the room.
I have studied this phenomenon for years, partly for my column and partly because I live here and cannot escape it, and I have concluded that Shoreditch operates on a paradox so perfect it deserves to be in a textbook. The neighbourhood is cool precisely because it performs indifference to being cool, and the moment it admits to wanting to be cool, it ceases to be. Coolness, here, is a quantum state that collapses the instant it is observed wanting itself.
The Anxiety Beneath The Cool
Beneath the performance, though, there is a real anxiety, and it is worth taking seriously. Shoreditch coolness is its economy, and its economy is precarious, dependent on remaining the place where the interesting things happen, terrified of the moment when the interesting people move on and the neighbourhood becomes, fatally, a parody of itself. The performance of effortlessness is, at bottom, the nervous labour of a place that knows its status is borrowed and could be revoked.
The serious thread, which I return to often, is that this is what happens when a neighbourhood becomes a brand, when authenticity becomes a commodity, when the genuine creativity that once made a place interesting is replaced by the careful performance of the appearance of that creativity. The real artists who first came here for the cheap space have largely been priced out, replaced by people performing the role of artist in spaces that are no longer cheap, and the difference, though hard to see, is everything.
So I will keep biographing this neighbourhood that hates to be photographed, documenting the expensive carelessness, the manufactured authenticity, the quantum coolness that collapses when observed. It is absurd, genuinely absurd, and it is also a real place where real people live and work and pay impossible rents, and the absurdity and the reality are, as ever in Shoreditch, carefully, effortlessly, intertwined.
The history of Shoreditch is the history of every gentrified neighbourhood, compressed and intensified, the familiar cycle of decline and discovery and decline-of-a-new-kind. Once an industrial district, then a derelict one, it became cheap, and the cheapness drew the artists, and the artists drew the galleries, and the galleries drew the cool, and the cool drew the money, and the money drove out the artists, and the cycle reached its current strange equilibrium, a neighbourhood famous for a creativity it can no longer afford to house.
The artists who first came are the ghosts of the place, the ones who saw potential in the derelict warehouses, who made the neighbourhood interesting before it was expensive, who created the cool that the money then arrived to purchase. Most of them are gone now, priced out by the very success they created, decamped to cheaper frontiers further east, leaving behind a neighbourhood that trades on their legacy while excluding their successors.
The performance that replaced the genuine article is sophisticated enough to fool most observers, the spaces that look like artist studios but are actually offices, the people who look like artists but are actually in marketing, the whole elaborate simulation of a creative quarter maintained long after the creativity has moved on. It is a kind of theme park of bohemia, beautifully done, and almost convincing, and not the real thing.
The money that drives the cycle is the same money that drives everything in London, the property money, the search for the next neighbourhood to acquire and develop and profit from, the relentless logic that finds a cheap interesting place, makes it expensive, and in doing so destroys the very interestingness that drew the money in the first place. Shoreditch is a case study in this logic, the neighbourhood consumed by its own success.
The next Shoreditch is always being sought, the cycle always beginning again somewhere cheaper, the artists always pioneering the next frontier that the money will eventually follow and ruin. This is the engine of London perpetual transformation, the wave of gentrification rolling eastward, each neighbourhood discovered, exploited, and abandoned in turn, the creativity always one step ahead of the money that pursues and destroys it.
More in this vein at The Daily Mash.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
