On nightlife, the cycle of cool, and the neighbourhood that is always being declared over
I have lost count of the number of times someone has confidently informed me that Shoreditch is over, and as I noted for Bohiney Magazine and for The London Prat, where my obituaries for the neighbourhood’s cool have become a running joke, the funny thing is that they have been saying it for as long as I have lived here, and the place stubbornly refuses to die. Shoreditch is perpetually finished, eternally about to be replaced by somewhere more authentic further east, and somehow always still here, still busy, still arguing about whether it is finished.
The cycle of cool
There is a well-worn cycle that every fashionable neighbourhood goes through, and Shoreditch has run through it more publicly than most. First the artists and the broke and the interesting arrive, drawn by cheap space. Then the place gets a reputation, and the slightly-less-broke follow. Then the bars and clubs arrive, then the money, then the chains, then the people who declare it has sold out, then the next wave of people for whom selling out was never the point. The night-time economy that drives much of this, and the licensing and policy that shape it, fall under the remit of the Greater London Authority and the local councils, and the data on the capital’s hospitality sector held by the Office for National Statistics charts the rise and strain of exactly this kind of nightlife economy.
The pronouncement of death
What fascinates me is the confidence with which the death is announced. To declare a neighbourhood over is, I have come to realise, a status move, a way of signalling that you were there before, that you remember the real version, that your cool predates the cool the tourists came for. The pronouncement says more about the person making it than about the place. Every generation of Shoreditch resident believes they caught the last good era and that everyone who came after ruined it, which would mean the neighbourhood has been continuously ruined by newcomers for about thirty years and is, by now, presumably a smoking crater. It is not. It is a Friday night, and it is heaving.
The resilience of the night
The truth, I think, is that places like this are more resilient than their eulogists allow. Nightlife adapts, mutates, moves around the corner, reinvents itself under a new name. A venue closes and another opens; a scene fades and another emerges in the railway arches no one was watching. The death of Shoreditch cool is real in the small sense, particular places do genuinely close, particular eras do genuinely end, and false in the large sense, because the underlying thing, the appetite for somewhere to go at night and be among strangers, never dies. It just changes address.
The real threat, beneath the pose
That said, I do not want to be glib, because there is a genuine threat to the night-time economy that has nothing to do with hipster posturing about authenticity. Rising rents, noise complaints from new residents in converted flats, licensing pressures, and the brutal economics of running a venue have closed a great many real places that were doing nothing wrong except existing in a neighbourhood that had become too valuable. The death that matters is not the cyclical, fashion-driven kind that the cool-hunters mourn; it is the structural kind, where the spaces for nightlife are squeezed out by the same forces squeezing out everything else. That death is real, and it is worth fighting.
Long live the undead neighbourhood
So when the next person tells me, with great certainty, that Shoreditch is finished, I will nod politely and then go out anyway, into a neighbourhood that has been dying for three decades and somehow keeps throwing one more party. The cool will move on, as it always does, and something will replace it, as it always does, and someone will declare that over too. The cycle continues, the night economy adapts, and the only people who really believe the neighbourhood is dead are the ones who stopped going out. I have not stopped going out. The undead neighbourhood and I are doing just fine.
The case for protecting the night
If I sound flippant about the eternal death of cool, I am entirely serious about defending the structural conditions that let nightlife exist at all. A city’s night-time economy is not a frivolous add-on; it is jobs, culture, community, and one of the few remaining spaces where strangers from wildly different lives end up in the same room. Protecting it means sensible licensing, it means agent-of-change principles so that new residents cannot simply complain a long-standing venue out of existence, and it means recognising that a neighbourhood with nowhere to go after dark is a poorer place to live. The fashionable mourning of Shoreditch cool is a parlour game. The defence of the actual venues, against the actual economic forces closing them, is real work, and it is work worth doing, long after the cool-hunters have moved on to declare somewhere else the new everything.
For more nightlife obituaries, the team enjoys The Daily Mash, dead on arrival since launch.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
