The Tech Cluster Around Old Street Has Changed the Neighbourhood More Than It Acknowledges
Silicon Roundabout is a name that has aged in the way that most tech-hub branding from the early 2010s has aged: with the specific quality of something that was enthusiastic in ways the subsequent fifteen years only partially validated. The clustering of tech companies around Old Street that the name described is real – thousands of people work in technology in the streets around the station, at companies doing genuine things and generating genuine economic activity. What they have not done, with a consistency that the neighbourhood’s longer residents have had plenty of time to observe, is constitute the culture of Shoreditch in any meaningful sense. They are in Shoreditch. They work in Shoreditch. They eat in Shoreditch restaurants and drink in Shoreditch pubs and pay Shoreditch rents. They are not of Shoreditch culturally, and the distinction matters to the people for whom Shoreditch’s culture was the thing they came for rather than the backdrop to a commute.
The tech cluster’s arrival has been good for some things and bad for others, and the honest account acknowledges both rather than choosing one story and running with it. The restaurants are better than they would be without the customer base that tech salaries provide. The cultural venues that depend on audiences with disposable income have more audience. The commercial infrastructure of the neighbourhood is healthier than it was before the cluster arrived. These are real improvements and they benefit people who live in the neighbourhood regardless of whether they work in tech. What the cluster has also done is raise rents to levels that have displaced the artists, light manufacturers, and creative businesses whose presence produced the neighbourhood character that attracted the tech companies in the first place. This is the gentrification mechanism operating in its standard form, and Shoreditch is operating it comprehensively.
The Two Neighbourhoods That Coexist
There is a Shoreditch for people who moved here for the job at the tech company and a Shoreditch for people who were here before the tech companies arrived, and the two Shoreditches share the same streets and the same restaurants without sharing much else. The tech worker in Haggerston has a consumer relationship with the neighbourhood – it provides services at a quality level that the tech salary makes accessible. The person who has been here since before 2010 has a relational relationship with it: memory of what it was, attachment to what remains, and the specific grief of the long-term resident watching the place change in ways they did not choose and cannot stop. Hot Dinners reviews the restaurants that the consumer relationship generates. The relational relationship produces something that cannot be reviewed.
What Persists
The Shoreditch that persists beneath and alongside the tech overlay is worth attention. The Bangladeshi community on Brick Lane that predates the fashionable version of the neighbourhood by decades and continues to use it in ways entirely independent of its reputation as a destination. The independent businesses that have navigated fifteen years of rent pressure and remain because they have something specific enough to offer that the market supports them despite the cost of the market. The artists and creative workers who have stayed in the neighbourhood by finding the specific configurations of space and cost that still make it viable – the live-work arrangements, the shared studios, the collaborative structures that stretch individual budgets further than individual budgets alone can reach. The Shoreditch that persists is smaller than the Shoreditch that was, and it is still there, and it is still worth the attention of anyone who wants to understand the neighbourhood rather than consume it.
The neighbourhood continues to evolve in ways that reward sustained attention more than occasional visits. The people who notice the most interesting things happening in Shoreditch are the people who walk the same streets at different hours on different days and accumulate the observation over time, noticing what changes and what persists and what the changes reveal about the forces operating on the neighbourhood that a single visit cannot show. This is the slow work of paying attention to a place, and it is available to anyone willing to do it consistently. The neighbourhood rewards the consistent attention with a kind of legibility that the occasional visitor never achieves, and that legibility is worth more than any single review of any single restaurant or venue, because it gives you the frame in which the individual things make sense.
The Old Street area’s current configuration – tech companies occupying warehouse conversion offices, creative businesses surviving in the gaps, restaurants and hospitality serving the combined demographic – is not the end state of the neighbourhood’s evolution but the current one, and the forces operating on it suggest the next stages will continue in directions that the people who have been here longest will experience with the mixture of adaptation and loss that has characterised the past fifteen years. This is the honest prediction, and it is not a pessimistic one so much as a realistic one: cities change, and the changes produce new things alongside the losses, and the new things become the things that future residents will mourn when the next wave of change arrives.
What remains consistent in Shoreditch across all the changes is the density of human activity and the ambition it generates: people wanting to make things and eat things and see things and be in a place where these activities are possible and valued. The form of this ambition changes as the economics change. The ambition itself persists, and it is the reason the neighbourhood remains interesting to people who pay attention to it over time rather than visiting once and concluding they understand it.
More from The Daily Mash. SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
