Cyndi Himmelstiere on sixteen years in E1, the bar she liked before anyone else did, and the specific guilt of being a long-term gentrifier who resents the newer gentrifiers
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
I have lived in Shoreditch for sixteen years, which is long enough to have developed opinions about what Shoreditch used to be like that I share with the conviction of someone who was there and the selective memory of someone who mostly remembers the parts that support the thesis that it was better then. I am aware that I am doing this. I am going to do it anyway, with the caveat that I also know that I am part of what changed the area, because sixteen years ago I was a young person who moved to a neighbourhood that was affordable precisely because other people had not yet discovered it was interesting, and by discovering it was interesting and living in it and writing about it, I contributed to the process of making it less affordable and therefore less accessible to the people who would have otherwise moved here in the same way I did.
This is the gentrifier’s paradox and I do not have a resolution to it. I have guilt and I have opinions and I am going to express both, and if you are reading this from a Shoreditch flat that costs three thousand pounds a month, you are welcome to direct the same energy at me as I am about to direct at the cocktail bar that opened where my dry cleaner used to be.
What It Was Like
When I moved to Shoreditch in 2009, the area around Curtain Road and Rivington Street had a quality that I can only describe as provisional: the sense that the spaces were being used for purposes that were not their permanent purpose, that the converted warehouses and the railway arches and the old factory units contained things — studios, markets, bars, venues — that were there because the rent was low enough to allow experimentation, and that the experimentation would either succeed and become established or fail and be replaced by other experiments. There was a market on the stretch near Old Street that sold things that were not quite vintage and not quite new, operated by people who appeared to have a complicated relationship with having a fixed business plan. It was excellent.
There was a bar I liked very much that did not have a sign above the door and required you to go through what appeared to be a storage unit to reach the actual bar, which was in a basement and served decent natural wine at prices that were high for the neighbourhood and low for what would become the neighbourhood. I told people about it, as you do, because that is what you do when you find something good. The people I told told other people. The bar eventually put a sign above the door. The prices increased. It is still there. I no longer go to it with the same frequency, because the character that made it interesting was the character of a place that not many people had found yet, and I helped ensure that many people found it, and now it is a well-known bar with a six-week wait for a Saturday reservation, which is both its success and its transformation.
What It Is Like Now
Shoreditch in 2025 is one of the most expensive neighbourhoods in inner London. Commercial rents on Brick Lane and Bethnal Green Road have increased to levels that make experimental retail and hospitality difficult to sustain. The studio spaces that housed artists have been converted to “co-working spaces with artist heritage,” a phrase that is doing significant work. The market that sold things that were not quite vintage now sells things that are quite specifically vintage at prices that reflect the market research of people who understand exactly what they are worth to the audience that comes to Shoreditch to buy them.
I am not saying this is only bad. Many of the businesses that have come to Shoreditch are good businesses run by good people making good things. The food is objectively better than it was in 2009. The coffee is objectively better. The neighbourhood is cleaner. The street art — though it too is now curated, sponsored, and documented before the paint is dry — is genuinely world-class in a way that has made Shoreditch a cultural asset of global reputation. These are real improvements. They came at a cost measured in the people and places that could no longer afford to be here, and that cost deserves to be named even by the people who, like me, were part of paying it.
Where I End Up
I am still here. I have chosen to stay in Shoreditch through all of its changes because the neighbourhood, even in its transformed form, contains things I value: density of interesting people, access to the things that London does well, the particular energy of a place that still, despite everything, attracts people who want to make things and try things and fail at things in public. The cocktail bar where my dry cleaner used to be makes very good cocktails. I have been to it. I am not happy about it. Both things are true.
Cyndi Himmelstiere writes from Shoreditch for The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine. Her homepage is at prat.uk/author/himmelstiere.
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SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/shoreditch-changed-i-am-part-problem-going-to-write-about-it-anyway/
