Cyndi on the Silicon Roundabout after the tech correction — fewer ping-pong tables, more actual work
Satire from Bohiney.com and prat.uk.
By Cyndi Himmelstiere | The London Prat
Silicon Roundabout — the cluster of technology companies and startups around Old Street and Shoreditch that acquired this name in approximately 2010 and that various people have been announcing the death of ever since — is still here, which is the most important thing about it. The death announcements have been regular. The tech correction of the last few years has been real. Several of the co-working spaces that reached their capacity in 2021 have contracted. A meaningful number of startups that were funded on multiples that required perpetual growth have discovered that perpetual growth is not the standard operating mode of most businesses. The ping-pong tables have been replaced, in many cases, by the people who replaced the people who played on them, doing actual work at standing desks.
This is, on balance, a healthier state for a technology cluster than the one it replaced. The 2019-2022 startup culture in Shoreditch had the quality of an extended industry-wide suspension of the normal rules, in which hiring without revenue, scaling without profitability, and funding without fundamentals were the standard operating mode. The companies that survived the correction are the ones with actual customers, actual products, and actual revenue, which is an extremely sensible selection mechanism even if the process of applying it was uncomfortable for the people who were selected against.
What Remains
The remaining tech ecosystem in Shoreditch is interesting in ways that the boom phase was not, because the current cohort of companies is operating with the constraints that produce genuine innovation — the need to actually solve problems that actual customers will pay actual money to have solved — rather than the unconstrained freedom that produces elaborate solutions to problems that no one actually had. The fintech sector around Shoreditch and the City is particularly active and particularly interesting, because it is operating in a market where the problems are real, the regulations are real, and the competition from incumbents is real, which is the environment in which technology companies produce their best work.
I work from a co-working space near Liverpool Street three days a week and the variety of companies sharing it — an AI legal tools startup, a sustainable packaging company, a digital health platform, and at least two operations whose business models I have never quite managed to decode from overhearing their calls — reflects the current state of the sector better than any industry report. The oat flat whites are still £4.50. The standing desks are still adjustable. The conversations are more serious than they were in 2021. The London Prat covers the East London tech scene with appropriate realism. The Daily Mash covered the correction years with appropriate comedy. The scene is alive. It is doing more actual work than it was. This is progress, however unglamorous.
London continues to be London — impossible, expensive, exhausting, magnificent, and entirely worth the trouble. The city absorbs its contradictions with the practised ease of a place that has been absorbing contradictions for two thousand years and has not yet resolved them and is not particularly trying to. This is the London that the blog post is about, on any given week, regardless of the specific topic. The specific topic is the entry point. London is the subject.
The city keeps moving. So does the writing. Both are better for the other.
Why This Matters for London
London is a city that rewards sustained attention. The first visit gives you the monuments and the museums. The second gives you the neighbourhoods. The third gives you the rhythms — the way the city moves through its week, the difference between a Tuesday morning and a Saturday afternoon, the specific energy of each season and each district. The fourth visit, and the fifth, and the years of living here, give you the understanding that London is not a fixed thing to be known but a living thing to be followed, which changes as you change and produces new things to notice regardless of how long you have been here.
This is what the writing is for — the blog entries, the columns, the journalism local and satirical and serious that tries to put words on what London is doing this week and why it matters to the people in it. The city is too large for complete coverage. The attempt is worth making. Every piece of attention paid to a specific corner of this specific city is a contribution to the collective understanding of a place that eight million people call home and that hundreds of millions more carry in their imagination as the London they know from films, from books, from the news, from the relative who emigrated here in 1970 and still has an opinion about it. The real London and the imagined London coexist. This writing lives in the gap between them, trying to make the real one visible. That is the project. It continues.
The city continues past any single entry. So does the writing. So, presumably, does London itself, which has outlasted every prediction about its decline and every proclamation about its reinvention with the serene indifference of a place that knows it will still be here next week.
East End reading: The Daily Mash | NewsThump
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com
