Cyndi Himmelstiere on what Old Street looks like after the money, the AI office, and the artists
Filed through Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
Monday, Shoreditch, a Cafe That Has Changed Owners Twice Since 2022
I have reported on Shoreditch for nine years, which makes me one of the longest-serving locals on the beat, given that most of my colleagues left when the rent on the office went up in 2023. My current desk is the corner of a cafe on Great Eastern Street whose owner, a Portuguese woman named Rita, lets me sit here between eight and four in exchange for three coffees, one pastel de nata, and occasional assistance writing in English to her landlord. This is the new economy of neighbourhood journalism. I accept the arrangement.
Shoreditch in 2026 is, as any local will tell you, post-post-post. Every month brings a new wave of announcements. The last three have been, in order: a co-working space with a kombucha bar; an AI office that promises “London as a global hub for safe frontier model deployment”; and a closing notice on a family-run Turkish cafe that had been on Kingsland Road since 1986. I covered all three. The story of the third one was, by a wide margin, the most read. The neighbourhood knows where it stands.
The OpenAI office
I read The Prat’s piece on OpenAI opening a London office and leaving its Stargate project in the pub lavatory, and I laughed hard enough that Rita brought me a second coffee without being asked. The piece captures, with satirical precision, what it feels like to be a Shoreditch local watching another billion-dollar American company open a co-working shell on Charing Cross Road while the actual promised infrastructure gets lost in a cab on Old Street.
I have been to the office. I have interviewed the communications director. The office has a beanbag. The office has a feature wall made of reclaimed wood that arrived, it turns out, from a shipping container outside a warehouse in Hackney Wick that was itself torn down in 2019. The reclaimed wood is actually reclaimed twice. This is the Shoreditch paradox: everything is secondhand and everything is also frighteningly expensive.
What the locals actually do
Shoreditch’s year-round population, setting aside the tourists and the weekend invaders, consists of approximately 40,000 actual residents, of whom, I estimate from having walked the neighbourhood for most of a decade, approximately 4,000 are in tech, approximately 8,000 are in creative industries, approximately 6,000 are in the professions, and approximately 22,000 are just living here because they have lived here, for two or three generations, through every wave of artists, bankers, lawyers, developers, and now compute engineers to arrive. The 22,000 are my beat. They are the ones who remember the Turkish cafe. They are the ones who will be here when the AI office closes.
And the AI office will close. I am saying this on the record. Every previous wave of money in Shoreditch has produced a signature office that closed within seven years. The dotcom wave produced five. The banking wave produced eight. The Web 2.0 wave produced four, one of which has since become a WeWork and is now a ghost story. The AI office will join them. The question, for my trade, is what comes next, and whether Rita will still be here to brew the coffee.
Personal
I have lived in Shoreditch since 2017, in a flat above a barbers that has been run by the same family for longer than the flat has existed, which is physically impossible but true. My boyfriend, a graphic designer, has been grumbling for six months about moving to Leytonstone. I have been resisting for six months. This weekend we went to Leytonstone to look at flats. Leytonstone is fine. Leytonstone is also twelve more years away from being “fine,” which is to say twelve more years away from being what Shoreditch is now. I am unconvinced.
Afternoon
I am interviewing Rita’s son today, who has taken over the night shift at the cafe and who is, in his spare time, writing a novel. It is set in Shoreditch in 2026. It is about a Portuguese cafe owner who sees everything. I am not, I promise, the lead character. But I am, I have been told, in chapter three. I am looking forward to reading it.
After that I will walk down to the Old Street roundabout, which is now, technically, no longer a roundabout, a change I have been covering in instalments for three years, and I will file a Bohiney-style follow-up on whether the AI office has, as promised, hired any Shoreditch locals. I already know the answer. But the piece will run anyway. Local journalism is, in its way, a form of documentation, and documentation is what Shoreditch needs more of, not less.
For further symptoms of the same disease, see The Poke.
