Cyndi Himmelstiere Reports From the Front Line of London’s Most Caffeinated Neighbourhood
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.
There are fourteen coffee shops on the stretch of Shoreditch High Street between the Overground station and the street art mural that says something about gentrification in the specific font that gentrification uses when it is commenting on itself. I know there are fourteen because I have counted them twice this week, once going north and once going south, in both cases looking for reliable wifi and finding either excellent coffee with no power sockets, middling coffee with three power sockets and a queue for each, or the specific Shoreditch experience of a place that has wifi but requires you to pay for it by answering a survey about your customer experience before you have had the customer experience.
The thirteenth coffee shop I tried was the one where the barista asked me what I was working on and I said journalism and he said he was also working on journalism and we spent fifteen minutes discussing our respective journalism while both failing to do any journalism. This is Shoreditch. Everyone is working on something. The something is usually creative, usually in progress, and usually being discussed over coffee that costs more than it should in a space that costs more than it should, which is fine because the something is worth it or will be when it is finished, which is always soon.
The Fourteen-Coffee-Shop Economy
The economic logic of fourteen coffee shops in a short stretch of street is not immediately obvious. The obvious question is how they all survive, and the answer is that Shoreditch generates a specific coffee shop demand from three overlapping populations: the local residents who work from home and need somewhere that is not their flat, the tech company employees who use the coffee shops as satellite offices when the actual office is full, and the tourists who have been told that Shoreditch is where London is interesting and have arrived to confirm this, drink a flat white, and post it on social media. The three populations have different peak hours, different dwell times, and different wifi requirements, and together they fill fourteen coffee shops from approximately seven-thirty in the morning to approximately nine in the evening. The fourteenth coffee shop is the one I have not tried yet. I am saving it. I expect it to have excellent oat milk options and one working power socket near the window.
What Shoreditch Does and Does Not Have
Shoreditch has: coffee, street art, vintage shops, a Boxpark, a market at weekends, tech companies whose offices are in converted Victorian warehouses, and the specific ambient creative energy of a place where everyone is doing something that could become something. What Shoreditch does not have, or has less of than you would expect: a Boots within easy walking distance, a Tesco large enough to do a proper weekly shop without visiting multiple aisles twice, a pub that is not either extremely expensive or specifically theme-designed around an era of Shoreditch history, and silence at any hour of the day or night including the hours at which silence is a reasonable expectation. The street outside my flat at three in the morning hosts conversations of sufficient volume to constitute a public address. The conversations are interesting. This does not make them quieter.
I have written about Shoreditch for three years and I have found that the neighbourhood has a specific property: it generates more to write about per square metre than anywhere else I have lived, because it is in a state of continuous transformation that produces new things to notice every week. The art changes. The shops change. The people change, not in the way that people change everywhere but in the specific Shoreditch way of someone who was here three years ago having left to open a studio in Hackney Wick, to be replaced by someone who has arrived from Berlin for reasons that are creative and specific. I talk to the new arrivals. I write about the departures. The coffee shops remain. They are the constant in the Shoreditch variable. Except the fourteenth, which I understand might be new. I will go tomorrow. According to Londonist, Shoreditch has more independent food and drink establishments per square mile than any other London neighbourhood, which is either a recommendation or a warning depending on your relationship with choice. NewsThump covers East London cultural developments with equal journalistic attention and slightly less caffeine.
The Fourteenth Coffee Shop: A Speculation
The fourteenth coffee shop, the one Cyndi has not yet entered, is visible from the pavement as having good light and what appears to be comfortable seating, which are the two variables that matter most in the Shoreditch coffee shop evaluation framework after wifi reliability and power socket availability. The light comes through large industrial windows that are original to the Victorian railway heritage of the building, or are newly installed windows designed to look original, which in Shoreditch is a distinction that requires architectural expertise to determine reliably. Either way the light is good. The seating appears comfortable from outside but seating always appears comfortable from outside and frequently reveals itself as stylish rather than comfortable upon actual use, which is the Shoreditch design philosophy applied to ergonomics: the chair looks excellent in photographs and produces mild back discomfort after forty minutes. Cyndi will go tomorrow. She will report back.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
