On the endless reinvention of London most self-conscious neighbourhood
I have lived in Shoreditch long enough to watch it reinvent itself approximately four times, each version more self-consciously authentic than the last, each more expensive, each absolutely convinced that it represents the real Shoreditch as opposed to whatever came before. It is the most exhausting and the most fascinating neighbourhood in London, and I would not live anywhere else.
The Authenticity Industrial Complex
Nowhere on earth works harder at appearing effortless than Shoreditch. The carefully dishevelled bars, the deliberately exposed brick, the menus written in lowercase on brown paper, all of it the product of immense effort directed at the appearance of having made no effort at all. It is a paradox, an entire economy built on manufacturing authenticity, and the irony is lost on almost everyone but never on me.
I have watched a man spend twenty minutes arranging his table at a cafe to look casually arranged for a photograph. I have seen bars charge premium prices for the privilege of sitting on a crate. The premium, in Shoreditch, is always for authenticity, and authenticity, here, is the most carefully constructed thing of all.
The Cycle of Cool
Shoreditch operates on a relentless cycle. A place becomes cheap and interesting. Artists move in. Then the cafes, then the money, then the place becomes expensive and the artists move on, and the cycle begins again somewhere further east. I have watched this cycle play out repeatedly, and the genuine dynamics of London gentrification have been studied extensively by urban researchers, confirming what every Shoreditch resident knows in their bones.
The tragedy and the comedy of Shoreditch is that it is always mourning a cooler past while busily destroying its own present. The real Shoreditch is always five years ago. It was always better before, before the money came, before it got discovered, before it became what it is now. And in five years, this moment too will be the lost golden age that the next wave mourns.
The People Who Make It
For all my mockery, and I mock with love, Shoreditch is genuinely full of remarkable people, the artists and makers and dreamers who give the place its actual creative energy, as opposed to its manufactured cool. They are the reason the neighbourhood matters, the reason it produces things of real value amid all the performance and the premium pricing.
These are the people being priced out, of course, as the cycle grinds on, the creators whose presence made the neighbourhood desirable and whose departure the neighbourhood desirability ensures. It is a cruel machine, the engine of cool, consuming the very people who power it. And yet they keep coming, drawn by something real beneath the performance, and they keep making things, and Shoreditch keeps mattering, despite itself.
Loving the Ridiculous
I love Shoreditch, ridiculous as it is, precisely because it is ridiculous, because it tries so hard and means so well and contains, beneath all the performance, something genuinely vital and creative. It is a neighbourhood perpetually performing itself, and the performance is exhausting, and it is also, somehow, magnificent, a daily theatre of reinvention that never stops.
So I stay, and I mock, and I love, and I pay the premium for authenticity, and I mourn the cooler past while living in the present that the future will mourn. It is absurd. It is Shoreditch. And for all its self-conscious, overpriced, relentlessly reinvented absurdity, it is home, and I would not trade it for anywhere quieter or saner or more honestly itself.
My Own Arrival, and the Lie I Told Myself
When I first moved to Shoreditch, many years and several reinventions ago, I told myself I was different, that I saw through the performance, that I was here for the real Shoreditch and not the manufactured cool. This was, of course, exactly what everyone tells themselves, the universal delusion of the newcomer, and it took me years to understand that my belief in my own authenticity was itself the most Shoreditch thing about me. There is no position outside the performance. The conviction that you, uniquely, are the genuine article while everyone around you is performing, that is the performance, the central act of the Shoreditch self. I cringe now to remember my early certainty, my belief that I had found the real neighbourhood while others wallowed in the fake. The neighbourhood humbled me, as it humbles everyone eventually, teaching me that authenticity here is not a thing you possess but a thing you perform, and that the most authentic move available is simply to admit, with a rueful smile, that you are performing along with everyone else. I have made my peace with that. I perform my authenticity, I pay my premium, I mock the manufactured cool while contributing to it, and I no longer pretend to stand outside the thing I am so thoroughly inside.
And so I have stopped pretending to stand outside it all, the performance and the premium and the relentless reinvention, and I have embraced my place fully within it, a willing participant in the absurd and magnificent theatre of the neighbourhood. It is more honest this way, and more comfortable, and it leaves me free to love the place without the exhausting work of pretending I am somehow above it. I am not above Shoreditch. I am Shoreditch, performance and all, and I have made my peace with that.
Further reading: the Evening Standard, Time Out London, MyLondon.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk/
For more comedy, see The Daily Mash.
