On a neighbourhood permanently displacing the people who just arrived
Writing for The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine from the heart of Shoreditch, I want to consider the neighbourhood’s defining and eternal condition: gentrification, which has been happening here forever and will, I am convinced, continue happening until the end of time. My other columns at my page document a neighbourhood in permanent transformation.
The Permanent Wave
Gentrification is usually told as a story with a beginning and an end, a neighbourhood that was once one thing becoming another, a transformation from poor to rich, from gritty to polished, from authentic to commodified. Shoreditch defies this narrative, for here gentrification is not an event but a permanent condition, a wave that never breaks, a transformation that never completes, each wave of newcomers displaced by the next in an endless cycle of arrival and displacement.
The artists who arrived to find cheap space were displaced by the creatives who followed them, who were displaced by the media types who followed them, who were displaced by the finance types who followed them, each wave arriving to enjoy what the previous wave had created, each wave pricing out the wave before, each wave destined to be priced out by the wave to come. The history of this, documented in the records of bodies like Hackney Council, is a history of permanent succession.
The Newcomer’s Lament
The great comedy of Shoreditch is the newcomer’s lament, the complaint, voiced by each wave, that the neighbourhood has been ruined by the wave that came after. The newcomer arrives, falls in love with the neighbourhood, settles in, and then, almost immediately, begins to complain that it is being ruined by the people now arriving, the people exactly like themselves a few years earlier, the next wave doing exactly what they did. Everyone in Shoreditch believes they arrived at the perfect moment, just before the neighbourhood was ruined, and everyone is wrong, because the ruination is permanent and the perfect moment never existed.
I am, I must confess, a participant in this comedy. I too arrived, fell in love, settled in, and began to complain about the newcomers ruining the place, the newcomers who are, of course, exactly like me, doing exactly what I did, falling in love with a neighbourhood I am now part of the problem of. We are all hypocrites here, all complaining about the gentrification we are ourselves part of, all lamenting the arrival of people indistinguishable from ourselves.
The Engine of the Cycle
What drives the permanent wave is the very thing that makes Shoreditch attractive, its reputation as a creative, edgy, authentic neighbourhood. This reputation draws newcomers, the newcomers raise the rents and polish the edges, the polishing threatens the very authenticity that drew them, and the search for authenticity moves on, to the next neighbourhood, the next frontier, even as Shoreditch continues to trade on a reputation its own success steadily undermines.
This is the paradox at the heart of the cycle: that the qualities that make a neighbourhood attractive are destroyed by the attraction itself, that authenticity, once discovered, begins immediately to vanish, that the creative frontier, once settled, ceases to be a frontier. Shoreditch is forever becoming less like itself, less edgy, less authentic, less creative, even as it forever trades on the reputation for being these things, a neighbourhood perpetually selling a quality it is perpetually losing.
The Displaced and the Displacing
Beneath the comedy lies a genuine sadness, for the permanent wave displaces real people, the long-term residents priced out, the communities scattered, the genuine artists who can no longer afford the spaces they made desirable. The cycle is funny when one focuses on the hypocrisy of the newcomers complaining about newcomers, but it is sad when one focuses on the displacement, the real loss suffered by those each wave pushes out. I try to hold both, the comedy and the sadness, the absurdity and the genuine cost.
I am aware, too, that I am on the displacing side of the cycle, a newcomer who priced out someone before me, who is part of the wave that pushed out the wave before. My complaints about the next wave do not change this, do not absolve me of my part in the permanent gentrification I lament. We are all, here, both displaced and displacing, victims of the wave behind us and agents of the wave we are part of.
The End of Time
The wave will continue, I am convinced, until the end of time, or at least until Shoreditch becomes so thoroughly gentrified that there is nothing left to gentrify, no edge left to polish, no authenticity left to commodify, no frontier left to settle. And even then, I suspect, the newcomers will complain about the newcomers, the perfect moment will be located just before the present, and the comedy of the gentrifiers lamenting gentrification will continue, because it is, apparently, eternal.
The Frontier Always Moves On
The permanent wave of Shoreditch gentrification has a geography as well as a history, for as each neighbourhood is gentrified, the creative frontier moves on, the artists and the seekers of cheap space pushing outward to the next undiscovered area, which becomes the new Shoreditch, until it too is discovered, gentrified, and abandoned for the next frontier. This outward movement traces a map of London’s gentrification, a frontier advancing across the city, neighbourhood after neighbourhood discovered, transformed, and left behind, the creative class always moving on, always seeking the next cheap and authentic place, always pricing out the place they find and moving to the next. Shoreditch was itself once the frontier, the new and undiscovered place, before it became the established and expensive place it is now, and the frontier has long since moved on, to neighbourhoods that are now becoming the new Shoreditch, that will themselves be gentrified and abandoned in their turn. The wave is not only temporal but spatial, advancing across the city, a frontier of cool moving outward, leaving gentrified neighbourhoods in its wake, seeking always the next authentic place to discover, transform, and abandon.
So I will continue to live here, in my gentrified neighbourhood, complaining about the gentrification I am part of, lamenting the newcomers indistinguishable from myself, participating in the permanent wave that has been breaking forever and will break forever, a newcomer who arrived at the perfect moment, just before the neighbourhood was ruined, exactly like everyone else who ever arrived, all of us wrong, all of us part of the ruination, all of us in love with a neighbourhood that is forever becoming less like itself.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com
