On flat whites, lost greasy spoons, and the awkward honesty of loving a neighbourhood you helped change
I have lived in Shoreditch long enough to have watched it become a parody of itself, and as I admitted in my latest piece for Bohiney Magazine and over at The London Prat, where my field notes from the front line of cool are collected, the most uncomfortable truth about gentrification is that those of us who complain loudest about it are very often the ones who caused it. I arrived with my laptop and my opinions about coffee, and I am in no position to throw stones, least of all artisanal ones.
The neighbourhood that ate itself
Shoreditch is the most studied case of urban transformation in London, the place every other gentrifying neighbourhood is compared to, the cautionary tale and the aspirational template all at once. Within a single generation it went from a down-at-heel corner of the East End to a global byword for a certain kind of beard-and-bicycle urbanism, and the speed of the change has been documented in census and economic data held by the Office for National Statistics and tracked by the local authority through Hackney Council. The numbers describe a community remade almost beyond recognition, its rents soaring, its character commodified, its old residents gradually priced out.
The greasy spoon and the flat white
I think about the greasy spoon that used to be on my corner more than is reasonable. It did a builder’s breakfast for under a fiver, the tea came in a mug the size of a small bucket, and the man behind the counter had run it for decades. It is now a place that sells a single perfect flat white for a price that would have bought a week of breakfasts at the old café, served by someone who can describe the bean’s emotional journey. I go there. I like it. I also feel a small, persistent pang of guilt every time, because I know exactly what it replaced and exactly who could no longer afford to stay.
The honest reckoning
The thing nobody who writes about gentrification likes to admit is that it is rarely a story of villains. There was no single decision, no cackling developer, just thousands of individual choices, people like me wanting somewhere interesting and affordable to live, that added up to a transformation nobody quite intended and everyone is now stuck with. I wanted what the neighbourhood offered, and in wanting it, I helped make it unaffordable for the next person who wanted the same thing. That is the uncomfortable engine of the whole process, and pretending otherwise is just a way of letting myself off the hook.
What is actually lost
It would be easy to be sentimental, and I am, a bit. But the real loss is not aesthetic, not the vanished cafés and the lost grit; it is the people. Gentrification, beneath the lifestyle coverage, is a machine for moving poorer residents out and wealthier ones in, for converting a place where ordinary people could afford to live into a place where they cannot. The long-standing communities, the families who had been there for generations, the small businesses that served them, these are what disappear, and they do not disappear into think-pieces. They disappear into longer commutes, into cheaper boroughs further out, into the slow erosion of the social fabric that made the neighbourhood worth coming to in the first place.
Loving the place you changed
And yet I love it here, which is the final awkwardness. I love the energy, the strangeness, the way you can turn a corner and find something you have never seen before. I am not going to perform a guilt I do not fully feel by pretending I want to leave. What I can do, I think, is be honest about my own part in it, refuse the comfortable fiction that gentrification is something that happens to a neighbourhood rather than something we do to it, and pay attention to the cost as well as the charm. The flat white is genuinely excellent. The greasy spoon is genuinely gone. Both of those things are true, and a neighbourhood honest about itself has to hold them together.
So I will keep living here, keep writing about it, and keep ordering the flat white with a faint sense of complicity. Shoreditch made me, and I helped unmake the Shoreditch that made me, and that paradox is the truest thing I can tell you about this strange, beloved, thoroughly compromised corner of East London. We are all part of the problem. The least we can do is be honest about it.
The next neighbourhood waiting
What sharpens all of this is knowing the cycle does not stop here. Even now there are people priced out of Shoreditch heading further east and north, into the next affordable, interesting corner, carrying with them the same tastes and the same laptops and the same capacity to transform a place simply by wanting it. They will love their new neighbourhood, raise its rents, lose its greasy spoons, and in a decade write the same guilty essay I am writing now. Gentrification is not a single event but a wave that keeps rolling outward, and every one of us riding it is both passenger and current. The honest thing is not to pretend we can step off the wave, which we cannot, but to notice the people it leaves behind, and to resist the comforting story that says it simply happened, with nobody at the wheel. Somebody is always at the wheel. Often, uncomfortably, it is us.
For more on the price of cool, the team enjoys The Daily Mash, gentrified beyond recognition.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
