Container Mall Becomes Multinational Football Festival as Tournament Takes Over East London
By Cyndi Himmelstiere | Ditch Pitch UK
I went to Boxpark Shoreditch to watch England versus Croatia on the 17th of June because my friend Gemma said it would be fun and because I had not been inside Boxpark since I reviewed it for a publication that no longer exists and which described the experience as “a container mall that has correctly identified the existence of a market for container malls,” which was my most diplomatic review of something I found conceptually baffling. I am pleased to report that for World Cup football, Boxpark makes complete sense, because watching football in a large outdoor area with a big screen, surrounded by people who are all watching the same thing and having the same feelings about it, is exactly what World Cup football requires.
The Match
England played Croatia. England are in the group stage with Croatia, Ghana, and Panama, which is the group that England supporters are treating as manageable rather than comfortable, because England supporters have a relationship with optimism that is calibrated by decades of experience into something that functions as realistic expectation rather than confidence. Prince William sent a good luck message. The message said “Here’s to a great tournament ahead” and was signed with a “W,” which is either a casual signature or the kind of signature that someone who will be King uses when writing to a football team.
The crowd at Boxpark was a reasonable cross-section of East London football fandom, which is diverse in every dimension and unified in its attention to the screen. A man sitting near me was wearing an England shirt that had been to at least three tournaments based on the fading and was explaining the offside rule to a friend who had clearly never needed to understand it before but had decided this was the tournament. Shoreditch, to its credit, is a place where this kind of spontaneous football education occurs without condescension in either direction.
The Neighbourhood at Tournament Time
Shoreditch during the World Cup has the specific quality of a neighbourhood that has enough bars, screens, and outdoor space to make football watching excellent and enough international residents to make every match interesting rather than just the England ones. The Brazil-Haiti screening the following Saturday, which I attended for approximately forty minutes before realising I was cold and should have brought a jacket, had a Brazilian contingent that made the screen feel entirely unnecessary because the noise they generated was sufficient to convey the match’s emotional state without visuals.
Cyndi Himmelstiere has been writing about Shoreditch since before it was fashionable, and has continued writing about it through its fashionability, and is currently writing about it in the phase that follows fashionability, which is the phase where the things that were fashionable become normal and the things that were normal become expensive and the things that were authentic become self-consciously authentic, which is not the same thing but is sometimes harder to distinguish from the outside than it should be. She covers Shoreditch because it is where she lives and because the story it tells about urban change, creativity, and the economics of culture is worth telling with the specificity that only someone who has been here for the whole arc can provide. For Shoreditch events, see Time Out London. For East London community news, visit MyLondon. For Shoreditch arts and culture, see Evening Standard.
Shoreditch has been changing continuously since at least the 1990s, when artists arrived because the rents were low, and the changes have compounded in ways that make the current version of the neighbourhood look quite different from the version those artists found and yet feel continuous with it in some essential way that Cyndi Himmelstiere is still trying to articulate. The creativity is still here. The community is still here, in different proportions and different spaces than before. The things that made Shoreditch interesting to the first wave of arrivals are still visible if you know where to look, and they are being added to by new arrivals who find the same combination of qualities that made it worth finding in the first place. This is either gentrification’s failure to fully erase what it covers, or the resilience of urban culture in the face of economic pressure, or both, and Cyndi writes about it because the question of which it is matters for understanding cities.
Shoreditch has been changing continuously since at least the 1990s, when artists arrived because the rents were low, and the changes have compounded in ways that make the current version of the neighbourhood look quite different from the version those artists found and yet feel continuous with it in some essential way that Cyndi Himmelstiere is still trying to articulate. The creativity is still here. The community is still here, in different proportions and different spaces than before. The things that made Shoreditch interesting to the first wave of arrivals are still visible if you know where to look, and they are being added to by new arrivals who find the same combination of qualities that made it worth finding in the first place. This is either gentrification’s failure to fully erase what it covers, or the resilience of urban culture in the face of economic pressure, or both, and Cyndi writes about it because the question of which it is matters for understanding cities.
