Cyndi Himmelstiere on the city after midnight, the pubs before closing, and why Shoreditch is still worth it
Satire from Bohiney.com and prat.uk.
By Cyndi Himmelstiere | The London Prat
Hoxton Square at midnight in June, with the days still long enough that darkness arrives late and the outdoor tables are still occupied, is the version of London that people who live elsewhere come here for and that people who live here take for granted until a night like this one makes them notice it again. The square is not extraordinary. It has a central garden, some mature trees, a set of benches, and the surrounding buildings that contain the bars and restaurants whose outdoor overflow populates the pavement on warm evenings. The extraordinary thing is the people in it, and the specific quality of a city that accommodates this level of public life at midnight without drama or anxiety, as if people being alive in public at midnight is the most natural thing in the world, which it is.
I was out on the 14th — the good Sunday I described in my weather column, the day that summer arrived briefly — and ended up in Hoxton Square at around 11 PM with a group that had started as four people at dinner and expanded, through the standard London evening accretion process, to about nine people by the time we found a table outside. The evening was warm enough for outdoor sitting without a jacket, which in London in June is either completely normal or deeply unusual depending on the year, and this year it was unusual enough to be notable and common enough to not be remarkable. We sat outside. We talked. The square accommodated us along with everyone else who had made the same calculation about the evening.
The City at Ease
One of the things that London does better than most cities of its scale is the management of its late-night public spaces — the squares, the parks that close at dusk but whose surrounding streets stay active, the stretches of the South Bank and the canal towpaths that continue to feel safe and populated without the active management that some cities require to maintain that quality. This is not universal: there are parts of London at midnight that are less comfortable than Hoxton Square and that reflect different balances between activity and safety. But in the Shoreditch and Hoxton area, at midnight in June, the city is doing what cities are for: providing the infrastructure for people to be in public together, voluntarily, doing nothing in particular except existing in a good place at a good time.
We eventually moved to a bar that stays open later than the others and stayed until the logical conclusion of the evening, which arrived around 1 AM when the group’s collective energy shifted from wanting to continue to wanting to have continued, which is the feeling that marks the proper end of a good night out. The Tube was not running at that hour by the standard weekend schedule. The night bus runs. London runs. The London Prat covers Shoreditch nights as part of covering London life. NewsThump covers the philosophical implications of late-night bus routes. The night was good. The square was full. The city was itself. This is why people live here.
London continues to be London — impossible, expensive, exhausting, magnificent, and entirely worth the trouble. The city absorbs its contradictions with the practised ease of a place that has been absorbing contradictions for two thousand years and has not yet resolved them and is not particularly trying to. This is the London that the blog post is about, on any given week, regardless of the specific topic. The specific topic is the entry point. London is the subject.
The city keeps moving. So does the writing. Both are better for the other.
Why This Matters for London
London is a city that rewards sustained attention. The first visit gives you the monuments and the museums. The second gives you the neighbourhoods. The third gives you the rhythms — the way the city moves through its week, the difference between a Tuesday morning and a Saturday afternoon, the specific energy of each season and each district. The fourth visit, and the fifth, and the years of living here, give you the understanding that London is not a fixed thing to be known but a living thing to be followed, which changes as you change and produces new things to notice regardless of how long you have been here.
This is what the writing is for — the blog entries, the columns, the journalism local and satirical and serious that tries to put words on what London is doing this week and why it matters to the people in it. The city is too large for complete coverage. The attempt is worth making. Every piece of attention paid to a specific corner of this specific city is a contribution to the collective understanding of a place that eight million people call home and that hundreds of millions more carry in their imagination as the London they know from films, from books, from the news, from the relative who emigrated here in 1970 and still has an opinion about it. The real London and the imagined London coexist. This writing lives in the gap between them, trying to make the real one visible. That is the project. It continues.
East End reading: The Daily Mash | NewsThump
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com
