Cyndi Himmelstiere on the great exposed brick shortage of our time
I want to open with a genuine confession, which is that I have, on more than one occasion, waited patiently for a stranger to finish photographing a specific stretch of exposed brick wall on Rivington Street so that I could then photograph the exact same wall myself, and at no point during this queue did either of us acknowledge the faint absurdity of two grown adults politely taking turns to document a wall.
This is Shoreditch. This has always, on some level, been Shoreditch. But something has genuinely shifted recently, and I think it is worth actually examining rather than simply mocking, tempting as the mocking remains.
The Wall Economy
Property owners along several of the area’s most photographed streets have, according to a few conversations I have had with local business owners, become increasingly aware of the specific commercial value a genuinely photogenic exterior now carries, independent of whatever is actually being sold inside.
One cafe owner told me she gets, by her own rough estimate, more foot traffic from people wanting a photo against her building’s mural than from people actually wanting coffee, a ratio she described with a mixture of gratitude and mild existential concern.
When The Art Becomes The Product
Shoreditch’s reputation as a street art destination developed organically over decades, artists working largely without commission, often without permission, building a genuinely significant creative reputation for the area block by block. What has changed, several longtime residents and gallery workers told me, is the increasing presence of commissioned, brand adjacent murals specifically designed with a phone camera’s aspect ratio in mind, rather than any purely artistic impulse.
“You can tell the difference within about two seconds of looking at it,” one local artist said, somewhat wearily. “Genuine street art has a kind of urgency to it. A lot of what’s going up now has a kind of, I don’t know, optimised quality. It knows exactly how it’s going to be photographed before it’s even finished.”
The Actual Numbers Behind The Phenomenon
Tourism research on Instagram driven travel behaviour has documented a broader global pattern in which specific locations, walls, installations, and backdrops become destinations primarily because of their photographic potential, a pattern researchers describe as reshaping how certain neighbourhoods develop, sometimes prioritising photogenic surface over the underlying creative or commercial substance that originally drew attention to the area.
“Shoreditch is a fairly textbook case study,” said one urban culture researcher I spoke with, who studies exactly this pattern. “The area built genuine cultural credibility over years. That credibility then becomes the thing being marketed, sometimes at the expense of the actual conditions that produced it in the first place.”
What Local Businesses Actually Think
Reaction among local business owners to the phenomenon is, unsurprisingly, mixed. Some genuinely welcome the foot traffic a photogenic exterior brings, regardless of whether it converts directly into sales, on the theory that visibility itself has some longer term value. Others describe a specific frustration at watching people queue outside their shop purely to photograph the wall next to it, ignoring the actual business entirely.
“I’ve had people stand directly in my doorway taking a photo of the mural above my sign,” one shop owner said. “I’ve had to ask people to move so an actual customer could get in. That’s a strange sentence to have to say out loud, but here we are.”
Who Is Actually Losing Out
What concerns some longtime residents and creative workers most is not the photography itself, which they generally regard as harmless if occasionally comic, but the broader economic pressure it reflects, rising commercial rents partly driven by the value landlords now place on genuinely photogenic frontage, a pressure that can push out exactly the kind of unglamorous, working creative studios and small independent businesses that built the area’s original reputation in the first place.
“The wall becomes valuable,” the local artist said. “The actual creative work happening behind the wall, in the small studio nobody photographs, becomes less economically central to the landlord’s calculation. That’s the part that actually worries me, not the tourists with their phones.”
The Queue For The Queue
On one particularly busy Saturday, I watched what I can only describe as a genuinely orderly, entirely unspoken queue form for a specific angle of a specific mural, roughly a dozen people taking it in turns, nobody organising it, nobody complaining, everybody simply understanding, through some shared unspoken social contract, that this was how it worked now.
I joined the queue. I am not proud of this. I got the photo. It looks, as far as I can tell, essentially identical to several thousand other photos of the exact same wall currently circulating online, which is, I think, the entire point and the entire problem simultaneously.
Where This Leaves The Neighbourhood
I do not think the answer is simply resenting the phenomenon, since Shoreditch’s creative reputation was always, in some sense, built for an audience, and audiences change format over time. What I would like, and what several people I spoke with echoed, is a version of this attention that circles back to genuinely support the working creative community that produced the area’s reputation in the first place, rather than treating that community’s output purely as a free, endlessly renewable backdrop.
Further Reading
More of my reporting on Shoreditch culture can be found at my author page at The London Prat, with additional coverage at Bohiney Magazine. Related material is collected at NewsThump.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com
