Eleven coffee shops in four hundred metres, and not one launderette left standing between them
I Counted Every Coffee Shop On One Shoreditch Street and the Number Broke Something In Me
There is a particular stretch of Shoreditch, which I will not name precisely because I do not want to trigger a stampede, where I recently found myself standing on a corner counting coffee shops with the grim determination of a woman conducting a census nobody commissioned. The final tally, across roughly four hundred metres of street, was eleven. Eleven places selling, broadly speaking, the same flat white, several of them within sight of each other, two of them close enough that you could hold a conversation between queues without raising your voice.
How We Got Here
I do not think any single person planned this. That is, in a way, the most Shoreditch thing about it, an outcome nobody designed and everybody somehow arrived at simultaneously, the way a group chat organically decides on a restaurant nobody explicitly suggested. Each shop, taken alone, makes sense. The exposed brick one does a lovely single origin. The one with the ridiculous amount of houseplants does an oat flat white that I will defend to my grave. The one that looks like a Scandinavian furniture showroom has the best pastries on the street, possibly the borough, and I say that as someone who has made it her business to know.
But taken together, walking the full length of that street with my coffee-counting clipboard, quite literally in this case, because I had brought one, the effect is less charming and more faintly surreal, a monoculture dressed up as variety, eleven different fonts on eleven near-identical awnings all promising the same essentially interchangeable experience of a nice seat and an oat flat white.
The Rent Question Nobody Wants to Ask Out Loud
What I keep coming back to, standing there with my clipboard looking, I am sure, faintly unhinged to passers-by, is what this density actually implies about commercial rents in the area. Eleven coffee shops surviving, more or less, on the same stretch suggests either a genuinely extraordinary volume of coffee-drinking humans passing through, which, fair, this is Shoreditch, or margins thin enough that I do not know how anyone is meaningfully profiting once rent, staff, and the frankly heroic cost of decent beans is accounted for. I suspect it is a bit of both, with a third factor nobody likes to say plainly: that several of these shops are propped up by owners with other income streams entirely, running the cafe as much for the Instagram footage and the neighbourhood cachet as for the actual coffee margin, which is its own quietly troubling thing if you are the barista whose wages depend on a business model that was never really about the coffee in the first place.
What Got Pushed Out to Make Room
The other question, the one that actually keeps me up slightly, is what used to occupy those eleven units before the coffee shops arrived, one by one, over the years I have lived here. A hardware shop, gone. A launderette that did next-day alterations, gone. A genuinely excellent, genuinely cheap caff that did a fry-up for under a fiver, long gone, and I still think about it more than is probably healthy. None of this is a new observation, gentrification displacing utility in favour of aesthetic, but standing on that corner with my ridiculous clipboard, it stopped being an abstract argument I nod along to and became a very specific, very countable fact: eleven coffee shops, and not one launderette between them.
In Defence of the Coffee, If Not the Count
I want to be fair to the shops themselves, because none of this is really their fault individually, and several of them are run by genuinely lovely people doing genuinely good work within an economic logic none of them personally invented. My complaint, if it is a complaint, is with the aggregate, the eleven, not the individual one. I will keep going to the plant one for my regular order. I will keep defending the pastries at the Scandinavian one. I simply think, walking that street now, that we might collectively benefit from someone, anyone, opening something that is not a coffee shop, if only so the street stops looking like a very expensive hall of mirrors reflecting the same flat white back at itself, eleven times over, all the way to the corner.
More Shoreditch dispatches, counted and otherwise, live at my author page, with the wider paper always worth a browse at The London Prat.
I mentioned the count to a friend who works in commercial property, half expecting her to tell me I was overreacting to what is, after all, just eleven small businesses selling a popular product. She did not tell me that. Instead she pulled up figures on her phone, roughly, from memory, and talked me through how a unit on that stretch has moved in asking rent over the years she has been tracking the area, a rise she described, with the weary precision of someone who has had this conversation many times before, as entirely consistent with what coverage of the borough’s changing high streets has documented more broadly, including analysis at Londonist tracking independent retail displacement across East London. Eleven coffee shops, it turns out, is not really a story about coffee at all. It is a story about what a unit has to generate in turnover just to survive, and how few business models manage it anymore besides the one currently occupying eleven doorways on a single street.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
