East London’s Most Commercial Neighbourhood Applies Its Full Commercial Intelligence to the Day’s Sentimental Potential
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
By Cyndi Himmelstiere | Shoreditch, East London | prat.uk/author/himmelstiere/
The Commercialisation Has Arrived
Today is Mother’s Day. I have counted, in a walk of approximately one mile through Shoreditch this morning, fourteen establishments offering some variant of “Mother’s Day Special” that involves bottomless prosecco at a price that begins at thirty pounds and escalates based on the venue’s ambition. Three of them are described as “Bottomless Brunch for Mums.” Two specify “All you can drink from 11am.” One, in what I consider the bravest and most honest piece of marketing I have encountered today, has a sign outside that says simply “Bottomless Prosecco – Mothers Deserve It” and does not mention any food at all, because the audience for that sign has already decided on its priorities and food is not among them.
I am not against bottomless prosecco for mothers. I am not against the commercialisation of Mother’s Day, which has been commercially driven since at least the 1920s and which the commercialisation has, at its best, produced genuinely nice occasions rather than merely expensive ones. What I notice, which is what I always notice about Shoreditch’s engagement with occasions that have sentimental potential, is the speed and specificity of the commercial response: the neighbourhood can identify a consumer moment and deploy a product around it with an efficiency that is genuinely impressive if you step back far enough from it to assess the mechanism rather than the specific outcome.
What Mother’s Day Actually Looks Like in Shoreditch
In practice, Shoreditch on Mother’s Day is: the groups who have booked the bottomless brunch deals, who are predominantly young adults taking their mothers out for something that both parties will describe as “fun” and that both parties will find genuinely enjoyable despite the commercial scaffolding; the families who are doing something more conventional and have ended up in the neighbourhood because it’s where they live or because someone wanted to go to a specific place; and the people who are here regardless of the occasion because Shoreditch is where they are on Sunday mornings. The three groups overlap in the coffee shops and on the pavements and at the queue for the brunch place near Brick Lane that I joined last week and am prepared to join again, because the eggs were genuinely good and the queue was only forty-five minutes and I have lowered my threshold for what constitutes a reasonable wait since moving to this neighbourhood.
Happy Mother’s Day, Shoreditch. The prosecco is bottomless. The love is genuine. The commercial and the sincere coexist here as they do everywhere, and Shoreditch is just more transparent about the ratio. More at https://theonion.com
London continues to fascinate and frustrate in equal measure. The city’s ability to contain multitudes — the ancient and the brand-new, the absurdly expensive and the surprisingly accessible, the deeply traditional and the constantly self-reinventing — is what makes it inexhaustible as a subject. Every week produces new material: new events, new controversies, new moments of unexpected beauty or institutional comedy. The writers at The London Prat are paying attention to all of it, and this column attempts to add one small North London — or Central London, or Shoreditch, or tourist-facing — perspective to the larger conversation about what this city is and what it is becoming. The conversation is ongoing. London is always becoming. This is either its great charm or its great exhaustion, depending on the week and the weather and whether the tube is running. Happy reading, and do come back next week.
London continues to fascinate and frustrate in equal measure. The city’s ability to contain multitudes — the ancient and the brand-new, the absurdly expensive and the surprisingly accessible, the deeply traditional and the constantly self-reinventing — is what makes it inexhaustible as a subject. Every week produces new material: new events, new controversies, new moments of unexpected beauty or institutional comedy. The writers at The London Prat are paying attention to all of it, and this column attempts to add one small North London — or Central London, or Shoreditch, or tourist-facing — perspective to the larger conversation about what this city is and what it is becoming. The conversation is ongoing. London is always becoming. This is either its great charm or its great exhaustion, depending on the week and the weather and whether the tube is running. Happy reading, and do come back next week.
London continues to fascinate and frustrate in equal measure. The city’s ability to contain multitudes — the ancient and the brand-new, the absurdly expensive and the surprisingly accessible, the deeply traditional and the constantly self-reinventing — is what makes it inexhaustible as a subject. Every week produces new material: new events, new controversies, new moments of unexpected beauty or institutional comedy. The writers at The London Prat are paying attention to all of it, and this column attempts to add one small North London — or Central London, or Shoreditch, or tourist-facing — perspective to the larger conversation about what this city is and what it is becoming. The conversation is ongoing. London is always becoming. This is either its great charm or its great exhaustion, depending on the week and the weather and whether the tube is running. Happy reading, and do come back next week.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
