Cyndi Himmelstiere on What Brick Lane Looks Like When the Galleries Close and the Co-Working Spaces Open
Reported by Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
By Cyndi Himmelstiere | Shoreditch Dispatches
The gallery on Rivington Street that showed emerging artists from the East End since 2009 is now a flexible co-working space with a juice bar attached. I walked past it on Tuesday and the feeling was the same feeling I get when I walk past any space that used to be something and is now something else: a kind of cartographic grief, the sense that the map I carry in my head is becoming less accurate every month and that updating it requires acknowledging losses I’d rather not process.
The gallery was not famous. It was small and had an inconsistent heating system and the openings were always packed because the wine was free and the art was sometimes very good and sometimes not but always local and always made by people who lived within walking distance. The co-working space is also local in the sense that it serves local professionals who work for companies headquartered elsewhere and who are present in Shoreditch because Shoreditch has the coffee and the atmosphere that their LinkedIn profiles imply they inhabit. This is a different kind of local.
The Shoreditch I Moved To
I moved to Shoreditch in 2011. I moved because it was affordable in the way that places are affordable when the people who make them interesting move in before the people who benefit from the interesting follow. I was one of the former, briefly, before becoming one of the latter. This is the gentrification sequence that urban geographers have described and that everyone who participates in it claims not to have noticed until it was too late, which is either genuine obliviousness or convenient amnesia depending on how charitable you’re feeling.
In 2011, the Old Street Roundabout was called Silicon Roundabout without much irony, because there were a handful of tech startups, and it felt optimistic and slightly absurd simultaneously. By 2015 it was not absurd. By 2020 it was infrastructure. By 2026 the startups have become companies and the companies have become employers and the employers have become the defining economic reality of a neighbourhood whose defining cultural reality used to be the people who couldn’t afford anywhere else.
What Has Stayed
Beigel Bake is open. At 4am, at 4pm, at whatever hour you arrive, the queue is the same and the people in the queue are the same mixture of post-club, post-work, post-dinner, and post-long-walk that it has always been. Some institutions are resistant to gentrification not because they are protected but because they are genuinely too good to be replaced by anything that the market can produce. The beigels are better than what the artisan bakery six doors down charges £4.50 for. The queue knows this.
The Boxpark, which I have complex feelings about — it is commercially successful and has maintained some food and event diversity and is physically interesting and is also a monument to the commodification of the market aesthetic — is still there and still busy and still the thing people who are visiting Shoreditch for a team outing from their office in Hammersmith think of as Shoreditch. This is not Shoreditch. But it is Shoreditch now. Both things are simultaneously true in the way that all gentrified neighbourhoods produce simultaneous truths about what was and what is and what the difference costs.
More of my Shoreditch writing at The London Prat. For the gallery that closed, I am writing a longer piece for the spring issue. The artists are in Leyton now. The commute is longer. The rent is lower. The map in my head needs updating.
For neighbourhood coverage that includes what’s lost, see NewsThump.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
