Planners defending some post-war buildings off Curtain Road used the word ecosystem, and I think they have put their finger on the thing Shoreditch keeps knocking down
Why Cheap, Tatty Buildings Matter
I rent a desk on the second floor of a building that no architect would stop to photograph. It went up in about 1962. It has a flat roof that leaks, a lift that has been awaiting a part since the spring, and windows that either will not open or will not shut.
It is also the reason I can afford to work in Shoreditch. There are nineteen small businesses in the building. A bookbinder. Two translators. A man who repairs synthesisers. A charity with four staff. A woman who makes wedding cakes. Somebody doing something with drones.
None of us would be here in a new building. I have been thinking about that since reading the planners’ objection to a scheme a few streets away.
The Word
In February, Hackney’s planning officers advised councillors to refuse a large office redevelopment on a site off Curtain Road. The local paper reported their reasoning. Demolishing the existing, cheaper post-war office buildings, they argued, though these were not thought to have architectural or historic interest in themselves, would erase a layer of industrial history and damage the local business and employment “ecosystem”.
Planners do not often talk like that. Their reports are usually about daylight angles and cycle parking. Here they were making an argument about how a neighbourhood’s economy actually works.
I think they were right, and I think it is the most important thing anyone has said about Shoreditch in years.
The Idea
It is not a new idea. An American writer on cities set it out more than sixty years ago. New ideas, she said, must use old buildings.
Her reasoning was about arithmetic. A new building has to pay back the cost of its construction. That means high rents. Only established, profitable businesses can pay high rents: banks, chains, law firms.
An old building was paid for long ago. Its owner can let it cheaply and still make a return. So old buildings are where you find everything that cannot pay much. The bookshop. The studio. The start-up. The peculiar restaurant. The thing nobody has tried before.
A district with only new buildings, she argued, can house only what has already succeeded. Nothing new can begin there.
She was writing about New York. She might have been writing about the streets behind Old Street.
How Shoreditch Proves It
The history of this neighbourhood is that theory in action.
In the 1990s the furniture trade had gone and the warehouses were empty. Artists moved in because the space was vast and cost almost nothing. That gave us the galleries and the reputation.
In the 2000s the same buildings, a little tidied, took the first technology firms. A trade magazine surveying the area in 2010 observed that it had become a natural technology haunt, largely because of cheap rents.
Both waves came for the same reason. Not the architecture, though the brick warehouses are handsome. The price.
And both waves were then priced out by their own success. The artists went first. The small tech firms followed.
The Second-Best Buildings
Here is the part people miss. The Victorian warehouses were converted long ago. They are now expensive. The handsome old buildings are no longer the cheap ones.
What is cheap now is the stuff nobody loves. The post-war blocks. Concrete frames and metal windows from the fifties and sixties, thrown up quickly on bomb sites. They are not listed. They are not pretty. Nobody campaigns for them.
But they have taken over the job the warehouses used to do. They are where the rent is low enough for the bookbinder and the synthesiser man.
That is what the officers saw. The buildings have no architectural merit. Their merit is economic. They are the last affordable rung.
The Case for Knocking Them Down
I must be fair to the other side, which is not stupid.
These buildings are worn out. Mine leaks. They are badly insulated and expensive to heat. New rules on energy efficiency will soon make it unlawful to let the worst of them without major work. That work costs money, and when it is done the rent goes up.
They waste land. A four-storey block on a site that could hold nineteen is, from one point of view, a poor use of some of the most accessible ground in London. More floorspace means more jobs.
And cheapness is not a design feature. It is a stage in a building’s life. You cannot freeze a neighbourhood at the moment it happens to be affordable. The warehouses were cheap once.
The developer’s answer to the ecosystem argument is usually “affordable workspace”: a share of the new building let at a discount. Hackney’s policy asks for ten per cent.
Why That Is Not the Same
I have looked at affordable workspace. Some of it is very good. But it is not what it replaces.
It is a discount on a new-build rent, which may still be more than the old rent was. It usually comes with conditions: you must be a certain kind of business, at a certain stage, for a limited term. There is an application. There is a provider who runs it.
The man who repairs synthesisers would not qualify. He is not a start-up. He is not going to scale. He has been mending the same machines for thirty years and wants a room with a bench and a kettle.
The old building asked no questions. It was cheap for everybody. That indifference is what let odd things grow.
And in the case that prompted all this, the officers noted that the scheme did not meet even the ten per cent.
What Could Be Done
If we are serious, three things.
Refurbish before demolishing. A tired concrete frame can be insulated, re-windowed and re-roofed for far less carbon and often less money than starting again. The rent rises, but not to new-build levels.
Where there is redevelopment, require that the cheap space be replaced like for like: the same floor area at the same sort of rent, without the application form.
And count it. The council knows how many homes it has. I doubt it knows how many square metres of genuinely cheap workspace remain in Shoreditch, or how fast they are going. You cannot protect what you have not measured.
My Building
We had a letter last month. The freeholder is “exploring options for the site.” We all know what that means.
The bookbinder has been here since 1994. She told me she has moved four times in her career, each time a little further east, each time because the building was coming down. She said, “There’s not much east left.”
When this one goes there will be a new block with a roof terrace and a cafe in the lobby. It will be much nicer. There will be nineteen fewer small businesses in Shoreditch, and nobody will have decided that. It will just have happened.
The London Prat has a fondness for unlovely buildings, having occupied several, and writes about them in its English satirical news on ugly office blocks and its UK satirical news about cheap rent. Bohiney Magazine covers a country where they call it a strip mall and nobody defends it.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
