Music and Tech Festival’s Second London Edition Fills Old Street Area With Lanyards and Ambition
By Cyndi Himmelstiere | Ditch Pitch UK
SXSW London returned to Shoreditch Town Hall for its second edition this month, spreading across Old Street with the energy of a festival that has understood that Shoreditch’s specific combination of creative infrastructure, tech-adjacent culture, and excellent public transport links makes it the correct location for an event that wants to be both a music festival and a networking conference simultaneously. The lanyard density in the area during the first week of June was remarkable. I have not seen that many lanyards since I attended a trade show in Excel that I have agreed not to discuss publicly.
The Programming
The lineup was, as advertised, gloriously eclectic. Rachel Chinouriri, whose R&B is among the most compelling British sounds of the current moment. Earl Sweatshirt, whose presence at a London festival dedicated partly to emerging talent is either an acknowledgment that he remains perpetually interesting or evidence that the booking budget expanded in year two. Tiwa Savage, who represents the global dimension of the festival’s ambitions. Cure for Paranoia. Infinity Song. The Devonté Hynes Ensemble. James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem, who at this point is required to appear at any festival that considers itself culturally serious and who delivers consistently enough to justify the requirement.
Shoreditch Town Hall itself, which opened in 1866 and has served as a boxing venue, a community hall, a theatre, and now a cultural venue that hosts everything from tea dances to major festival stages, provides the specific backdrop that Shoreditch events at their best inhabit: the building knows it has history and doesn’t mention it constantly, which is the correct approach to having history.
What It Means for The Ditch
SXSW coming to Shoreditch is either validation that the area remains a genuine creative hub or evidence that it has become the kind of place where creativity is celebrated rather than created, which are different things. The area still has actual studios, actual artists’ workspace, actual creative businesses that use Shoreditch because it works for them rather than because it is where SXSW is. The festival does not determine Shoreditch’s character. But the lanyard density does change the atmosphere for a week, and I spent more of the first week in June north of Old Street than I would normally, which is either preference or data.
Cyndi Himmelstiere has been writing about Shoreditch since before it was fashionable, and has continued writing about it through its fashionability, and is currently writing about it in the phase that follows fashionability, which is the phase where the things that were fashionable become normal and the things that were normal become expensive and the things that were authentic become self-consciously authentic, which is not the same thing but is sometimes harder to distinguish from the outside than it should be. She covers Shoreditch because it is where she lives and because the story it tells about urban change, creativity, and the economics of culture is worth telling with the specificity that only someone who has been here for the whole arc can provide. For Shoreditch events, see Time Out London. For East London community news, visit MyLondon. For Shoreditch arts and culture, see Evening Standard.
Shoreditch has been changing continuously since at least the 1990s, when artists arrived because the rents were low, and the changes have compounded in ways that make the current version of the neighbourhood look quite different from the version those artists found and yet feel continuous with it in some essential way that Cyndi Himmelstiere is still trying to articulate. The creativity is still here. The community is still here, in different proportions and different spaces than before. The things that made Shoreditch interesting to the first wave of arrivals are still visible if you know where to look, and they are being added to by new arrivals who find the same combination of qualities that made it worth finding in the first place. This is either gentrification’s failure to fully erase what it covers, or the resilience of urban culture in the face of economic pressure, or both, and Cyndi writes about it because the question of which it is matters for understanding cities.
Shoreditch has been changing continuously since at least the 1990s, when artists arrived because the rents were low, and the changes have compounded in ways that make the current version of the neighbourhood look quite different from the version those artists found and yet feel continuous with it in some essential way that Cyndi Himmelstiere is still trying to articulate. The creativity is still here. The community is still here, in different proportions and different spaces than before. The things that made Shoreditch interesting to the first wave of arrivals are still visible if you know where to look, and they are being added to by new arrivals who find the same combination of qualities that made it worth finding in the first place. This is either gentrification’s failure to fully erase what it covers, or the resilience of urban culture in the face of economic pressure, or both, and Cyndi writes about it because the question of which it is matters for understanding cities.
