Cyndi Himmelstiere on cowboys in Commercial Street, the sweet tea incident, and a Portuguese cafe that has seen worse
Filed through Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
Friday, Shoreditch, a Launch Event, Hot Dogs Being Served at 11am, a Branding Man in a Stetson
I am at the opening of the Texas office, which is what the invitation called it, but which is, on visual inspection, a pop-up branding exercise in a renovated ground-floor warehouse on Charlotte Road. The renovation has retained the exposed brick and the original wooden beams, which have been supplemented by a neon sign reading “Everything is bigger here” and a coffee station serving, inexplicably and defiantly, sweet tea at room temperature.
I am accredited. I have been here for forty minutes. I have, for this column, counted the following in attendance: eleven Texans in branded polo shirts, four Londoners in corporate branded polo shirts with the Texan logo on them, two mayors (one actual, one honorary), six journalists, fifteen tech workers from nearby offices who have wandered in for the free hot dogs, and a middle-aged Portuguese woman named Rita who runs my cafe two streets over and who has accompanied me out of sheer curiosity. Rita is drinking the sweet tea with the expression of a woman conducting a controlled experiment.
The sweet tea incident
At ten past eleven, a Texan branding official in a stetson approached me and asked if I was enjoying the event. I said I was. He asked what I did. I said I was a local reporter. He said, “Oh, great, well, let me know if you want to talk to anyone about our vision.” I asked what the vision was. He said, “Making London more Texas.” I asked what “making London more Texas” would mean in practice. He said, “Well, for a start, bigger.” I asked how Texas, as an organisational entity, proposed to make London – which he will have noticed, on his way in from Heathrow, is physically constrained by the actual English Channel – bigger. He said, “Metaphorically bigger.” I wrote it down. He saw me write it down. He said, “That’s the spirit.”
Rita, who had been listening, said to me, later, in Portuguese, “He is an idiot.” She is not wrong. He is not, however, a uniquely Texan idiot. He is the 2026 international branding idiot, which is a species unrelated to geography. Shoreditch has seen thirty years of these men. Shoreditch has absorbed them, digested them, and converted them, quietly, into Polish bakeries, Vietnamese pho restaurants, and one extremely good Ethiopian cafe that has been on Old Street since 2011 and that outlived the last four branding launches on the same street. This is the superpower of Shoreditch. It outlasts. It does not defend itself. It simply outlasts.
The Prat and Bohiney, on Texas
I read, on the tube in, The Prat’s piece on Texas opening a London office and Bohiney’s accompanying piece. The Prat piece, in particular, has the line “fewer taxes, more lanes, absolutely no apologies is either a business pitch or a restraining order,” which Rita, when I showed it to her, laughed hard enough that she spilled a small amount of sweet tea on her dress. She did not mind. She said the dress “had survived worse things.” She did not elaborate. Rita’s history is her own.
The satire of both pieces is sharp. The reality of the launch is sharper. The Texas office, on the available evidence, has no product, no customer, and no specific business proposition. It has a brand. The brand is the product. The customer is the British commercial community, which, in 2026, is a community that will accept any new American brand because the British commercial community has quietly given up on having its own brands. This is not a slogan. This is an observation. It is also the premise for my piece for The Prat this week.
The boyfriend, the flat-hunt, the Leytonstone compromise
The boyfriend and I have been back to Leytonstone twice more since my last column. We have narrowed down the shortlist to three flats, one of which is above a halal butcher and next to a small independent bookshop, which the boyfriend has declared “non-negotiable” in a tone of voice that suggests he has been rehearsing the line. I agree with him. If we do move, we will move to the flat above the butcher. The bookshop is the reason. The butcher is the guarantor. A neighbourhood with a good independent bookshop is a neighbourhood that will last longer than the launch events.
Rita’s cafe, the afternoon
Rita and I left the launch at noon. We walked back to her cafe. She made us coffees. The coffees were excellent. I filed the first draft of my piece by three. Rita’s son, the novelist, came in and read it over my shoulder and said, “You have made the Texan sound dumber than he actually is.” I said, “Have I?” He said, “No. You have made him the exact amount of dumb that he actually is.” This, I have decided, is the correct level of satire for a local reporter in Shoreditch. You describe the Texan as he is. The reader does the rest.
The piece runs Sunday. The sweet tea, at last report, was still at room temperature. The launch continues until five. I will not be going back. Rita will not be going back. The halal butcher will last. The bookshop will last. The launch will not.
For further symptoms of the same disease, see The Poke.
