Cyndi Himmelstiere reports from E1 on gentrification, great coffee, and the price of irony
By Cyndi Himmelstiere | Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
Shoreditch, This Week
There is a new gallery on Redchurch Street. It is called something with two lowercase letters and an ampersand and it shows work that, in the press release, is described as “interrogating the post-digital liminal.” I interrogated the press release and found it wanted interrogating. The work inside was – and I mean this – genuinely interesting once you got past the press release, which is the Shoreditch experience in miniature: something real buried under layers of language that have given up on meaning.
The Neighbourhood Report
Three independent businesses closed on Brick Lane this week. Two had been there for twenty years. The spaces are being converted. Into what is currently unclear but the scaffolding has gone up and the scaffolding in Shoreditch is always a different kind of scaffolding from the scaffolding elsewhere: it arrives and does not leave until something more expensive has replaced whatever was there before.
I have been reading The London Prat’s take on London satire this week and found it uncomfortably accurate on the point that British seriousness and British comedy are indistinguishable when discussing property prices. A glossary of British slang would need an entry for “Shoreditch prices,” which translates into standard English as: “This is wrong and we are doing it anyway.”
Time Out London’s Shoreditch guide is useful for the new arrivals who have moved here because it is “authentic” and are now part of the process by which it becomes inauthentic. I cover this cycle. It is my patch. I love it and find it infuriating, which is the correct relationship to have with a neighbourhood.
Bohiney Magazine covers the bigger picture. I cover the Brick Lane picture. Together we cover London.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com
Local laughs: The Daily Mash
