Cyndi Himmelstiere Documents the East London Experience at the Hour When the Creative Economy Meets the Actual Night
Written by Cyndi Himmelstiere for Bohiney Magazine, republished by The London Prat. Cyndi writes about Shoreditch from inside Shoreditch, which is both the advantage and the problem.
Shoreditch at three in the morning is a different neighbourhood from Shoreditch at three in the afternoon, in the specific way that all London neighbourhoods are different at three in the morning but Shoreditch is different in a more pronounced and specific way. At three in the afternoon, Shoreditch is the creative economy in visible operation: people on laptops, people in meetings at coffee shop tables, people carrying equipment between studios, people having conversations that are pitched at the volume appropriate to the ambient noise level of a neighbourhood that is operating. At three in the morning, Shoreditch is the post-creative economy: people who have been to bars, people who are on their way to different bars, people who are sitting on the pavement for reasons that are either philosophical or practical, and occasional people who are shouting something that is clearly important to them and whose importance I cannot determine from across the street.
I have been in Shoreditch at three in the morning more often than I had planned when I moved here, because living in a neighbourhood where things happen at all hours of the night means that things happening outside your window at three in the morning is the standard condition rather than the exceptional event. I have made peace with this. The peace is partial and is achieved through earplugs of a quality that blocks the conversation but not the bassline, which is either the correct acoustic hierarchy of a Shoreditch building or evidence that the earplugs need upgrading.
The Population of Three in the Morning
The people of Shoreditch at three in the morning are a subset of the people of Shoreditch at other hours, but it is a subset with specific characteristics: they are younger, louder, more likely to be in groups, and less likely to be carrying a laptop bag. They are also, in my observation, more likely to be having conversations about things that matter to them with an intensity that the daytime version of the neighbourhood does not always produce, because the daytime version is busy and purposeful and the three-in-the-morning version has nowhere to be by a specific time and can therefore say the things that busy purposeful days do not leave room for. I have had several interesting conversations at three in the morning outside my building with people I have not met since, which is the specific social pattern of the late night in a neighbourhood where everyone is in transit between somewhere and somewhere else and the pavement is the third option when neither is available yet.
The Morning After and What It Finds
Shoreditch at seven in the morning is the transition between the night version and the day version, and it is the most honest version because it contains both simultaneously: the coffee shops opening for the early-arriving laptop people, the last few people from the night before making their way to the Overground, and the specific atmosphere of a neighbourhood that has just finished being one thing and is about to start being another. I live in the transition. I find it useful. It is the hour when Shoreditch is most clearly visible as what it is: a place where multiple versions of London overlap in a single geography and coexist not always comfortably but always interestingly. According to Londonist, Shoreditch is one of London’s most active nighttime economies by venue density. NewsThump covers London nighttime economics with the full attention the subject deserves at any hour that is not three in the morning.
The Morning Version of the Three in the Morning People
Cyndi has encountered, at the seven in the morning transition hour, several of the people she had previously encountered at three in the morning, and the morning version of these people is instructively different from the three-in-the-morning version: quieter, more directed, carrying coffee rather than being in conversations about it, and moving through the neighbourhood with the specific purpose of people who know where they are going. The three in the morning version of these people was also purposeful but the purpose was less visible, or was a different kind of purpose, the kind that involves being somewhere rather than going somewhere. Cyndi finds the three-in-the-morning people more interesting to talk to. She finds the seven-in-the-morning version of them more reassuring, which is a distinction about what she wants from the neighbourhood at different hours and which is, she has decided, the correct relationship to have with a place that is different versions of itself at different times.
The transition hour between three in the morning and seven in the morning is also, for Cyndi, a productive writing hour, because the street outside the flat is quiet enough after approximately four-thirty that the ambient noise of the neighbourhood drops below the threshold that interferes with concentration. The Shoreditch that exists between four-thirty and six-thirty in the morning is the most useful version for a journalist who writes at a desk near a window: the street art is visible in the early light, the coffee shops are not yet open but the bakery deliveries have begun and the smell of fresh bread is the specific morning signal that the day is starting correctly. Cyndi writes in this hour most mornings. The articles she produces between four-thirty and six-thirty are, she believes, the best ones. The ones she produces after the first coffee shop opens are louder and faster and slightly less considered, which is what coffee does to writing and which is both a problem and a feature of the Shoreditch journalistic life.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
