The neighbourhood that is always becoming something never quite manages to be
Reporting brought to you by Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
A Place In Permanent Transition Is A Place That Never Arrives Anywhere
I have lived in Shoreditch long enough to watch it reinvent itself several times over, and I have come to a slightly unsettling conclusion about the place: Shoreditch has been becoming something for so long that it has forgotten what it actually was, and may no longer be capable of simply being anything at all. The neighbourhood exists in a state of permanent reinvention, always transitioning into its next phase, always becoming, never quite arriving. And a place in permanent transition, I have realised, is a place that never actually gets anywhere.
The Phases Of Reinvention
Consider the phases Shoreditch has passed through, each erasing the last. It was an industrial district, then a cheap area where artists could afford studios, then a creative hub, then a hub of nightlife and fashion, then a tech centre, then a destination for tourists seeking the very edginess that the tourism was busy destroying. Each phase reinvented the neighbourhood, erasing what came before, transforming Shoreditch into its next version. The reinventions have been continuous, each one consuming its predecessor, the neighbourhood perpetually becoming its next phase before the current one could settle into anything stable.
The trouble with this perpetual reinvention is that it leaves no time for the neighbourhood to actually be anything. Each phase is barely established before the next reinvention begins, the area transformed again before its current version can become real and settled and itself. Shoreditch is always in transition, always becoming, never arriving at a stable identity that it can simply be. The perpetual reinvention, which might seem like dynamism, is in fact a kind of restlessness, a refusal or inability to settle, a place forever becoming and never being. A neighbourhood needs time to become itself, time for its character to settle, for its identity to form, for it to grow into something stable and real. Shoreditch is never granted this time, transformed again before each version can take hold, reinvented before it can settle, never allowed to simply be what it has become before being made into something else entirely.
The Forgotten Original
Somewhere beneath all the reinventions lies the original Shoreditch, the actual neighbourhood that existed before the cycle of reinvention began. But it has been so thoroughly buried under successive transformations that it is hard to recover, hard even to remember. The reinventions have erased the original, replacing it with phase after phase of becoming, until the actual neighbourhood that started it all is lost beneath the accumulated transformations. Shoreditch has reinvented itself so many times that it has forgotten what it was, the original buried under the endless becoming.
This forgetting matters, for a neighbourhood with no remembered identity, no stable sense of what it actually is, becomes a kind of blank surface for projection, a place that can be made into anything because it is no longer anything in particular. Shoreditch has become this, a neighbourhood so reinvented that it has no stable identity, a blank surface onto which each new phase projects its vision. The forgotten original has left Shoreditch identity-less, a place defined only by its perpetual becoming, with no settled self beneath the transformations.
The Exhaustion Of Cool
There is also a particular exhaustion to Shoreditch’s reinventions, the exhaustion of a place that has been cool for too long, that has been the destination of cool for so many cycles that the coolness has become a kind of burden, a reputation to be maintained through ever more reinvention. The pressure to remain cool, to keep becoming the next cool thing, drives the perpetual reinvention, the constant transformation into the next phase of coolness. But the coolness is exhausting, the reinvention relentless, and the neighbourhood seems tired, worn out by the endless effort to keep becoming cool.
This exhaustion of cool is the late stage of a neighbourhood’s reinvention cycle, the point at which the coolness has become a burden rather than an energy, the reinvention a treadmill rather than a dynamism. Shoreditch seems to have reached this stage, tired of being cool, exhausted by the perpetual reinvention, worn out by the endless becoming. The neighbourhood that was once genuinely edgy and creative now performs edginess and creativity, going through the motions of reinvention, tired but unable to stop, cool but exhausted by the effort of remaining so.
The Place That Never Arrives
Shoreditch has been reinventing itself for so long that it has forgotten what it was, a place in permanent transition that never quite arrives anywhere. For the actual record, Hackney Council has it, and Historic England covers the wider picture. The perpetual reinvention, the endless becoming, has left the neighbourhood without a stable identity, the original buried under successive transformations, the coolness exhausted by the relentless effort to maintain it. I sometimes wish Shoreditch would simply stop, settle, become something stable that it could just be, rather than forever becoming its next phase. But the neighbourhood seems incapable of arrival, condemned to perpetual transition, always becoming and never being, a place that has reinvented itself out of any settled identity, forever in transit toward a destination it will never reach.
More from the desk of Cyndi Himmelstiere, and further wit at The Poke.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
