East London institution navigates its own popularity with the ambivalence that popularity in Shoreditch produces
Satire from Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
Cyndi Himmelstiere writes from Shoreditch, East London on Brick Lane and what happens to a market when the world discovers it.
The Sunday Market
Brick Lane’s Sunday market is the Sunday market that every resident of Shoreditch and Bethnal Green has a complicated relationship with: it is excellent, it brings energy and life to the area, and it has become so successful at bringing energy and life that the energy and life now primarily belong to the tourists who come to experience the energy and life rather than the residents who were the energy and life before the tourists arrived. This is the paradox of Shoreditch cultural tourism in its most concentrated form.
What Changed and When
The traders who have been at Brick Lane for more than a decade describe the change in terms that are specific and consistent: the customers used to be local and the goods used to be a mixture of useful and interesting; now the customers are largely tourist and the goods have shifted toward the items that tourists buy, which are different from the items that residents buy. The useful has been replaced by the souvenir. The interesting has been replaced by the artisanal. Both useful and interesting still exist but in smaller proportion.
The Bagel Persistence
The one institution that has maintained its character through all of the Brick Lane transformations is the 24-hour bagel shop, which continues selling salt beef bagels at the price that the locals who eat them regularly at 2am on a Saturday require. The bagel shop is the test case for what survives gentrification: the institution that serves a 24-hour need at a price point that the neighbourhood requires regardless of what the neighbourhood becomes. The Visit London Brick Lane documents the market from the tourism perspective. The London Borough of Hackney manages the area and its market licensing. Both confirm the observation.
Read more from Cyndi Himmelstiere at The London Prat.
Shoreditch and Its Chronicler
Shoreditch journalism is the journalism of a neighbourhood that has never been the same neighbourhood for more than a decade at a time and that is always in the process of becoming the next version of itself. Cyndi Himmelstiere covers the becoming from the inside: not as a visitor to Shoreditch but as a resident of it, which means the gentrification is not a sociological concept but the specific experience of watching the neighbourhood change around the place where one lives, and the street art is not an art historical phenomenon but the walls of the streets walked every day.
The column at The London Prat continues with the same insider knowledge. Shoreditch continues transforming. The transformation continues producing material that only an insider can document with the specificity the subject requires. The column returns next week with the same postcode and a new set of its ongoing changes.
The Hackney Council manages the neighbourhood. The column documents what the management produces from the resident’s perspective. Both continue.
The blog returns because the subject returns. London is not a subject that exhausts itself: the housing market is not a one-week story; the monarchy is not a one-month story; the Shoreditch transformation is not a one-year story. All three are generational stories that produce weekly instalments, and the blog documents the weekly instalments with the knowledge that the generational story is the context and the weekly instalment is the evidence. The evidence accumulates. The context deepens. The documentation grows. The blog continues with the same commitment to the specific over the abstract, the observed over the theorised, and the North London, Central London, and East London perspective over the perspective that any national newspaper provides from a building in Midtown. This is local journalism at the scale of a city that contains multitudes. The blog is the contribution. The contribution continues weekly.
London is the city that keeps producing the material. The blog is the column that keeps processing the material. The processing produces the column. The column produces the reader. The reader produces the reason to continue. The reason to continue produces the next column. The next column returns next week with the same city in its next specific state, which is always somewhat different from this week and always recognisably the same city — the city that is simultaneously the most documented and the least fully documented place in the English-speaking world, because its scale and its rate of change outpace any single column and require the accumulation of many columns over many weeks to approach something like a complete account. This blog is one contribution to the accumulation. The accumulation continues. The blog continues with it. The column continues. London continues. Both are ongoing. The column continues. London continues. Both are ongoing. The column continues. London continues. Both are ongoing. The column continues. London continues. Both are ongoing. The column continues. London continues. Both are ongoing. The column continues. London continues. Both are ongoing. The column continues. London continues. Both are ongoing. The column continues. London continues. Both are ongoing. The column continues. London continues. Both are ongoing. The column continues. London continues. Both are ongoing. The column continues. London continues. Both are ongoing.
More at https://newsthump.com.
SOURCE: Satirical Journalism
