Cyndi Himmelstiere on the Specific Signs That a Neighbourhood Has Gone From Genuinely Cool to Performing Coolness at Scale
Shoreditch Has Peaked and I Can Prove It
I have lived in Shoreditch for four years, which is long enough to have watched the last genuinely weird independent venue become a very good cocktail bar that costs fourteen pounds a drink and has a sign on the door saying “no stag parties” that is both understandable and also somehow the clearest possible signal that the stag parties have been replaced by something that merely looks different. I am not saying Shoreditch is bad now. I am saying it is performing its former self, which is a specific stage of neighbourhood development that follows creativity, precedes full corporatisation, and produces a version of the place that has all the visual cues of the original and none of the economic conditions that created them.
The Evidence
The evidence: there are now eleven different places on Brick Lane to buy the same artisanal sourdough, and three of them describe it as “East London craft bread,” which is a thing that did not exist as a category when I arrived and which represents the moment when local food culture has been successfully branded. The graffiti on the Shoreditch High Street walkway has a council permit now, which I want to be clear is probably the right decision environmentally but which represents a state of affairs that the original artists would find either hilarious or depressing or, given the people involved, probably both at once in a way they’d find generative. The vintage clothing shops have been replaced by vintage-aesthetic clothing shops that sell new clothes made to look old at prices that the actual vintage shops would not have dared charge.
I am not going anywhere. Shoreditch is still the most interesting postcode I have lived in and I have lived in several. The food is genuinely excellent. The art is genuinely present. The coffee is the best in London without argument. What has changed is that the interesting things are now competing with a substantial infrastructure of things that look interesting and are performing interestingness at scale for an audience that has come specifically to experience it, and the genuine interesting things have to be found rather than stumbled upon, which requires the kind of local knowledge that I have and that the people who arrived six months ago are currently developing. I resent this about myself slightly. I am telling you anyway.
Shoreditch life at The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine. East London coverage at MyLondon. Further at santaclaus.top and Shoreditch UK Bluesky. East London satire at Newsthump.
What I Am Actually Saying
I am saying: Shoreditch is still worth living in. I am also saying that the reasons to live here have changed, and the reasons that the people who came here twenty years ago had for being here are mostly not available anymore, and that this is how cities work and that I know this and that knowing it doesn’t prevent the specific mild melancholy of watching a genuinely interesting place become expensively interesting and then competently interesting and then, eventually, a destination for people who are interested in the idea of interesting. I am at stage three, watching stage four arrive. This is fine. Stage four’s coffee is also excellent. I maintain my position on the coffee. I am going to another new bar opening on Thursday that a friend says is ‘actually different.’ I have been told this before. I am going anyway. This is Shoreditch. This is the arrangement.
This neighbourhood continues to be worth the complicated feelings it produces. The complications are part of it. You cannot live in a place that is changing this fast without being part of the change and being slightly implicated in it and finding this uncomfortable and continuing to live here anyway. This is the specific experience of East London in the 2020s. It is not comfortable. It is extremely interesting. Both things simultaneously, which is probably the most honest description of Shoreditch I am capable of writing, and I have been trying for four years.
Four years in E1 and I have settled into the neighbourhood’s contradictions rather than trying to resolve them. The expensive cocktails and the Bangladeshi restaurants coexist one street apart and serve different communities that overlap in ways I find interesting and that produce a neighbourhood that is richer than either alone would be. The artists and the engineers share a postcode and occasionally a bar and apparently a ceramicist who also thinks about planning reform. The market at 6:30 and the market at 10:30 are the same market serving different purposes in the same street. All of this is Shoreditch, all of it simultaneously, and living in it requires holding all of it at once without resolving it into a simpler story. I have been practicing this for four years. I am getting better at it. The neighbourhood continues to give me material. This is a good arrangement for a writer, and possibly for anyone who wants to understand how cities actually work when they’re working properly which is to say, messily, for multiple people, at multiple price points, without anyone fully controlling the outcome.
