Cyndi Himmelstiere on the Specific Melancholy of Watching Your Neighbourhood Become Its Own Parody While You Pay Rent in It
Reported by Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
By Cyndi Himmelstiere | DitchPitch.uk
I have lived in Shoreditch for seven years. I moved here because the rent was relatively affordable for an area this close to the City, because there were good coffee shops and interesting people and a kind of creative energy that made the slightly grim flat with the inadequate heating feel like a reasonable trade-off for a life lived in a neighbourhood that was still working out what it was. Seven years later, the rent is no longer relatively affordable, the heating in the flat has been upgraded by the landlord who needed to do it before the next rent review, and Shoreditch has definitively worked out what it is: it is a destination. It is the neighbourhood that people visit on weekends from other parts of London and from other parts of the world to take photographs of its street art, eat at its restaurants, and purchase its aesthetic at a price point that reflects the premium of authenticity that has been applied to every square metre of the experience.
The Street Art Problem
The street art that made Shoreditch the subject of international photography has been, for at least five years, substantially composed of commissioned pieces by artists who were paid by the property developers and building owners who understood that street art increases property values and foot traffic in ways that make the cost of commissioning it a reasonable marketing expenditure. This is not a criticism of the artists, who are producing excellent work under conditions that pay them for it rather than requiring them to risk prosecution to produce it. It is an observation about the nature of the aesthetic: the rawness that made the art interesting was produced by its unsanctioned character, and the sanctioned version — however technically accomplished — occupies a different cultural register that the photographs of it do not always acknowledge.
I walk past the murals every day. Some of them are genuinely extraordinary. Some of them are pieces by artists whose international reputation was built in exactly this neighbourhood in exactly this manner. The neighbourhood made the artists. The artists’ presence made the neighbourhood valuable. The value attracted the development that commissioned the art. The cycle is complete and it has produced something real and something that is also a simulacrum of the thing that made it real. Both things exist simultaneously on the same wall. This is Shoreditch in 2026.
The Restaurants
The restaurants are excellent. This is genuinely true. The density of good restaurants per square kilometre in Shoreditch is, I would estimate, higher than anywhere else in London except possibly some corners of Soho that are smaller and more concentrated. You can eat Taiwanese, Eritrean, Peruvian Japanese fusion, proper south Indian, exceptional tacos, a counter-service beef fat chip experience that has a three-week wait for Saturday evening bookings, and several varieties of natural wine bar experience that provide both the wine and the experience of feeling sophisticated in a room that has been very carefully designed to feel unsophisticated. All of this is genuinely good. The food is excellent. The restaurants represent real culinary culture, real immigrant cuisines, real craft, real creative investment. They are also expensive. The beef fat chips experience costs more than my grandmother spent on food in a week. This is not the restaurant’s fault. It is the location’s fault, and the location’s fault is that it has become the kind of location where these prices are what the market will bear.
What I Actually Like About It
I remain here, at a rent that I review annually with a mixture of resignation and the calculation that moving would be more expensive and more disruptive than staying, because the neighbourhood at seven in the morning on a weekday — before the destination visitors arrive, before the weekend tourism picks up, in the grey light of an early weekday with the coffee shop on my corner just opening and the building sites doing their slow morning startup and the people who actually live here going about the actual business of their lives — is still the neighbourhood that I moved to. It is still, in its unremarkable daily texture, a genuine place with genuine people and genuine community in ways that the weekend version of it does not entirely represent. The man who runs the hardware shop on the side street has been there since before any of this. He knows everyone. His shop serves the people who live here and the builders who are, ironically, building more of what is changing the neighbourhood he has always known. He is here every morning. So am I. We nod. We have never spoken at length. This is enough.
According to Tower Hamlets Council, which covers the Shoreditch area, the borough has some of the highest rates of poverty in London alongside some of its fastest-rising property values, which is the specific geography of gentrification expressed in statistical form: the wealth arrives but its distribution is not even and the people who were there before do not all benefit from it. This is not news. It is the London condition applied to a specific postcode. I know this. I pay the rent. The neighbourhood does what it does. I write about it. This is my part of the arrangement.
Cyndi Himmelstiere writes about Shoreditch and East London. Her homepage is at The London Prat.
For more Shoreditch and East London observations, visit NewsThump.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
