The neighborhood that made edginess profitable now wrestles with what profit did to the edge
There is a cycle that plays out in Shoreditch, over and over, with the reliability of the tides, and once you have seen it, you cannot unsee it. A place becomes cool, the cool attracts attention, the attention attracts money, the money raises the rents, the rents drive out the very people who made the place cool, and the cool, having been thoroughly monetized, curdles into something else. I am Cyndi Himmelstiere, I have watched this cycle turn several times now, and I am no longer sure whether Shoreditch is gentrifying or being gentrified, or whether, by now, those are the same thing.
The Engine of Cool
Shoreditch became cool because it was cheap and edgy, a formerly run-down corner of East London where artists and creatives could afford space, where the rough edges had not been smoothed away, where something genuine and unpolished could happen. The cool was real, born of genuine creativity in a place that the money had not yet discovered, and for a while Shoreditch was one of the most genuinely interesting places in London, an authentic creative scene flourishing in cheap and gritty surroundings.
But cool, in a city like London, is never left alone for long. The creativity that made Shoreditch interesting attracted attention, the attention attracted the developers and the brands and the money, and the money began, inexorably, to transform the place. The cheap spaces became expensive, the rough edges were smoothed away and then sold back as features, the authentic grit was repackaged as an aesthetic and priced accordingly. The very qualities that made Shoreditch cool became commodities, and the commodification began to erode the qualities themselves.
This is the familiar story of gentrification, documented across cities and neighborhoods, tracked by urban researchers and covered by outlets including the press that chronicle London’s relentless transformation. Shoreditch is not unique in undergoing it, but it has undergone it with a particular intensity and self-awareness, a neighborhood that knows exactly what is happening to it and is, in a sense, complicit in its own transformation, selling the very edginess that the transformation destroys.
The Self-Awareness Problem
What makes Shoreditch’s gentrification distinctive is its self-awareness, the degree to which everyone involved knows exactly what is happening and participates anyway. The developers know they are selling edginess that their development destroys; the brands know they are commodifying a cool that commodification erodes; the new arrivals know they are part of the wave that is driving out the people who made the place worth arriving in. The cycle turns in full view of everyone, and no one quite knows how to stop it, or whether they even want to.
This self-awareness produces a peculiar atmosphere, a knowingness, an irony, a sense that everyone is performing a part in a process they understand and cannot escape. The new cafe knows it is a gentrification cafe and leans into it; the development knows it is destroying the character it advertises and sells the contradiction as a feature. Shoreditch has become a place that is endlessly aware of its own gentrification, that has made the awareness itself into part of the aesthetic, a knowing complicity that is somehow more dispiriting than simple obliviousness would be.
The result is a neighborhood caught in an endless loop, perpetually gentrifying itself, perpetually destroying the cool it depends on, perpetually aware of doing so. Each turn of the cycle smooths away a little more of the authentic edge, replaces a little more of the genuine creativity with its commodified imitation, and yet the cycle continues, because the money that drives it has nowhere else to go and the cool that feeds it keeps regenerating, briefly, in the cracks, before being discovered and monetized in turn.
Where the Cool Goes
The genuine creativity that gentrification drives out of Shoreditch does not vanish; it moves, to the next cheap and gritty corner of the city, to the places the money has not yet discovered, and the cycle begins again there. This is how London’s creative geography evolves, the cool moving ever outward, fleeing the gentrification it triggers, always a step ahead of the money until the money catches up. The creatives who made Shoreditch have largely moved on, to Hackney Wick, to Peckham, to wherever is cheap and gritty enough to allow genuine creativity to flourish, for now.
And Shoreditch, left behind by the creativity it incubated, becomes something else, a place that was once cool and is now merely expensive, that trades on a reputation for edginess it no longer quite deserves, that sells the memory of its cool to people who arrived too late to experience the real thing. This is the fate of the gentrified neighborhood, to become a monument to a coolness it has destroyed, a place that remembers being interesting and now mostly just charges a lot for the memory.
I find this cycle endlessly fascinating and faintly tragic, and I write about it, and about the neighborhood caught in it, over at my home on The London Prat, because Shoreditch is a perfect laboratory for understanding how cities consume the very creativity that makes them worth living in.
So watch the cycle turn, in Shoreditch and wherever the cool has fled to next, and notice how the city makes edginess profitable and profit destroys the edge. More observations on London’s restless transformation appear at The London Prat, and the wider story is chronicled by the London press.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
