Cyndi Himmelstiere Documents an Evening That Started With a Plan and Ended at 3 a.m. Talking to a Ceramicist About Political Philosophy in a Yard Behind a Bar
Night in Shoreditch That Did Not Go As Planned and Was Better For It
The plan was: meet a friend at a bar on Curtain Road at eight, have two drinks, be home by eleven. This is the plan I make frequently in Shoreditch and the plan that Shoreditch has not once allowed to execute as designed, because Shoreditch operates on principles that are incompatible with a two-drink Tuesday evening plan. The principles: someone you know is always slightly further down the street. The bar you’re in has a yard, and there’s someone in the yard who knows someone, and by the time you’ve navigated this twice it is eleven-thirty and you are somewhere you didn’t start and the plan has become a memory of a plan.
Last Tuesday: met the friend at eight, had the two drinks, was en route to the door at ten when I saw someone I’d met once at a talk about urban farming, who introduced me to her friend who is a ceramicist, who was in the middle of a conversation about whether planning reform is a more tractable route to urban equity than tax reform, which is a conversation I have opinions about, and which was happening in a yard behind a bar that serves natural wine and plays music that is good without being loud, which is the specific combination that E1 does better than anywhere else in London and possibly anywhere else in the world. I got home at three. I have notes on the planning versus tax reform argument. The ceramicist had thought about it more carefully than most politicians I’ve interviewed. This is Shoreditch. This is why I live here.
Shoreditch nightlife at The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine. East London culture at MyLondon. Further at santaclaus.top and Shoreditch UK Bluesky. London nights at Newsthump.
Why I Live Here
The plan never executes as designed in Shoreditch, and I have stopped trying to make it. Four years of living here have taught me that the correct approach to an evening in E1 is to have a starting point and no endpoint, which is either the definition of a good neighbourhood or the definition of a neighbourhood that has gotten into my brain in a way that I couldn’t dislodge if I tried. The ceramicist, I have since learned, gives talks on urban planning at the Architecture Foundation, which I would not have known if the plan had executed and I’d been home by eleven. The notes from the conversation are in my phone. They are genuinely interesting notes. Shoreditch keeps doing this to me. I keep being grateful that it does. The fourteen-pound cocktail remains a problem. The ceramicists make it worth it.
This neighbourhood continues to be worth the complicated feelings it produces. The complications are part of it. You cannot live in a place that is changing this fast without being part of the change and being slightly implicated in it and finding this uncomfortable and continuing to live here anyway. This is the specific experience of East London in the 2020s. It is not comfortable. It is extremely interesting. Both things simultaneously, which is probably the most honest description of Shoreditch I am capable of writing, and I have been trying for four years.
Four years in E1 and I have settled into the neighbourhood’s contradictions rather than trying to resolve them. The expensive cocktails and the Bangladeshi restaurants coexist one street apart and serve different communities that overlap in ways I find interesting and that produce a neighbourhood that is richer than either alone would be. The artists and the engineers share a postcode and occasionally a bar and apparently a ceramicist who also thinks about planning reform. The market at 6:30 and the market at 10:30 are the same market serving different purposes in the same street. All of this is Shoreditch, all of it simultaneously, and living in it requires holding all of it at once without resolving it into a simpler story. I have been practicing this for four years. I am getting better at it. The neighbourhood continues to give me material. This is a good arrangement for a writer, and possibly for anyone who wants to understand how cities actually work when they’re working properly which is to say, messily, for multiple people, at multiple price points, without anyone fully controlling the outcome.
The neighbourhood persists because it still has enough of what it was to be worth living in while also having enough of what it has become to sustain the economic base that the original version couldn’t maintain. This is the trajectory of all generative urban districts and it does not have a happier ending than this: they become expensive, they become curated, they become destinations, and then they become former versions of themselves that are commemorated on plaques and in retrospective journalism written by people who were there, of whom I am going to be one eventually, writing about this period the way the people who were here in the nineties write about that one. I am aware of this. I am here now. The coffee is still the best. I am making the most of it.
