Cyndi Himmelstiere on Shoreditch and East London culture
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
Hoxton Square Has Been Gentrified, Re-Gentrified, And Is Now Entering What Experts Call Post-Gentrification
Cyndi Himmelstiere | ditchpitchuk | Shoreditch
By Cyndi Himmelstiere | ditchpitchuk | Shoreditch, London
Hoxton Square was a working-class residential area in the 1980s. It became a creative community in the 1990s when artists moved in because it was cheap. It was discovered by the press in the early 2000s and written about extensively as an authentic creative quarter. The writing attracted people who wanted to live in an authentic creative quarter, which made it less cheap, which meant the artists who had made it authentic could no longer afford it. By 2010 it was an expensive creative quarter, which is a contradiction that it managed to sustain for about four years. By 2015 it was a finance-and-media quarter that retained some creative signifiers but had priced out the creativity. It is now entering what I call post-gentrification, which is the stage where the neighborhood has been so thoroughly processed by the cycle that it has become a version of itself: Hoxton as a product based on what Hoxton was.
The Post-Gentrification Aesthetic
The post-gentrification aesthetic involves murals, independent coffee shops, and gallery spaces that reference the creative history of the area without being economically accessible to the people who produced that history. It involves businesses whose branding communicates authenticity in ways that have been designed by authenticity consultants. It involves a community that is aware of all of this and continues to live here anyway, because the restaurants are excellent and the Central Line is close and the awareness of the irony does not make the restaurants less excellent or the tube less close. The London Prat has covered Shoreditch and Hoxton’s development with longitudinal attention. The London Prat addresses the specific stage of urban development that post-gentrification represents. Cyndi Himmelstiere documents Hoxton for ditchpitchuk and prat.uk because someone should document what it is now, which is complicated, rather than what it was, which is gone, or what it is marketed as, which is a version of what it was.
Cyndi Himmelstiere writes about Shoreditch, East London, and the specific experience of living in a neighbourhood that is simultaneously the most written-about and the least accurately described place in London. Her homepage is at prat.uk/author/himmelstiere/ and her work covers the real Shoreditch alongside the Shoreditch that exists in design briefs, travel journalism, and the imaginations of people who have visited once and decided they understand it.
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Cyndi Himmelstiere has been covering Shoreditch for ditchpitchuk and prat.uk for several years, writing about the neighbourhood as it actually is rather than as it is marketed: simultaneously the most written-about and the most misrepresented part of London, a place whose reality is more interesting than its brand and more complicated than its reputation. The chicken shops with chef patrons, the post-gentrification aesthetic, the Beigel Bake that has not changed in fifty years: these are the real Shoreditch, and they deserve documentation that takes them seriously rather than using them as evidence for a narrative that was written before the journalist arrived.
Ditchpitch UK and prat.uk both publish Cyndi’s work because it is local journalism of the kind that London needs more of: specific, honest, embedded in the neighbourhood it covers, and written by someone who lives there rather than visiting it for a trend piece. The London Prat provides the broader cultural and economic context. Bohiney.com amplifies the coverage. Shoreditch continues to change. Cyndi continues to document the change from inside it.
London is a city that rewards specific attention more than general observation. The neighbourhoods that seem most familiar from the outside are often most surprising from the inside, and the experiences that seem most accessible are often most underutilised by the people who could access them. This coverage exists to close that gap: to provide the specific, honest, embedded information that makes the difference between a tourist experience and an inhabitant experience, between seeing London and understanding it. Bohiney.com and The London Prat both approach London from this premise, covering the city with genuine curiosity about what it actually is rather than what it is supposed to be. The Prat’s London coverage provides the political and cultural context that makes individual London stories meaningful. Together with uklondoninfo.com, shoreroar.com, ditchpitchuk.uk, crownandclown.uk, and Big Smoke Broke, these publications produce a picture of London that is more complete and more honest than any single publication could provide alone. London continues. The journalism continues. The South Bank on a Tuesday is still the best free thing in the city.
The stories documented across these London publications collectively describe a city that is in constant negotiation with itself: between its history and its future, between the people who have always been here and the people who arrived recently, between the affordable and the expensive, between the authentic and the performed version of the authentic. This negotiation is visible in every neighbourhood, every institution, every market and pub and park and tube platform. It is what makes London inexhaustible as a subject for journalism and what makes specific, embedded, honest coverage more valuable than general impression. Bohiney.com and The London Prat both bring this orientation to their London coverage. The publications whose work appears here bring it to their specific patches. Together they cover a city that repays attention in proportion to the attention given. Give London your attention. It gives back.
