Behind the cereal cafes and the cocktail bars, an older neighbourhood is quietly vanishing, and someone should write down what was here
Writing about Shoreditch for Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat means writing mostly about the new, the cool, the manufactured, but today I want to write about the old, the thing that was here before, the East End that the polishing has quietly erased, because someone should write it down before it is entirely gone.
There was a neighbourhood here before the cereal cafes and the cocktail bars, a working East End of markets and trades and tight communities, of families who had lived here for generations, of a culture that was rough and warm and real and is now almost entirely vanished, displaced by the wave of money and cool that I spend most of my time, somewhat guiltily, documenting. The old East End did not perform authenticity. It simply was, and now it largely is not.
The People Who Were Here
The people who were here, the families, the traders, the workers, did not leave by choice. They were priced out, as the cheap neighbourhood became expensive, as the rents rose beyond what working people could pay, as the shops that served them gave way to the shops that serve the newcomers. The transformation that the brochures call regeneration was, for them, displacement, the loss of homes and communities and a way of life, and the polished new neighbourhood is built, quite literally, on the ground from which they were removed.
I have tried, in my column, to record some of what was here, the names of the old shops, the stories of the old families, the texture of the community that the gentrification erased, because the official story of the neighbourhood, the story of its exciting transformation into a creative hub, leaves them out, and someone should put them back in. The history of a place is not only the history of its discovery by the fashionable; it is also the history of those who were there before and were swept away.
The Cost Of Polish
This is not a simple story of villains and victims, for gentrification brings real improvements too, the investment, the safety, the amenities, the genuine benefits that flow into a neglected area when the money arrives. The serious analysis of gentrification, which I follow closely, recognises this complexity, the way regeneration both improves and displaces, both builds and erases, the gains and the losses falling, as they so often do, on different people.
But the complexity does not erase the loss, and the loss is what I want to record, the vanished community, the displaced families, the erased culture, the human cost of the polish, paid by the people who were here before and are now, mostly, gone. The new neighbourhood is brighter, safer, richer, and it is built on the erasure of the old, and both of these things are true, and the truth that the brochures omit is the second one.
So I will keep writing it down, the last of the old East End, the names and the stories and the texture of what was here, because the polishing is nearly complete and the old neighbourhood nearly gone, and when it is gone entirely there should be a record, somewhere, that it existed, that real people lived here, that a community was here before the cereal cafes, and that its erasure, however much it improved the place, was also a loss, and a loss with a human face.
The markets were the heart of the old East End, the street markets where the traders called their wares, where the community gathered, where the rhythms of working life played out, generation after generation, in a continuity that stretched back centuries. Some of the markets survive, transformed, their old character overlaid with the new, the genuine trade mingling with the artisanal pastiche, the old and the new uneasily sharing the same pitches.
The trades that sustained the neighbourhood, the manufacturing, the workshops, the small industries that provided the work, vanished before the cool arrived, the deindustrialisation that hollowed out the area and made it cheap, the precondition for everything that followed. The empty warehouses that the artists later colonised were empty because the work that filled them had gone, the creative quarter built in the shell of the industrial one.
The communities that lived here were tight in the way that working-class communities often were, bound by proximity and shared circumstance, by the pub and the market and the street, by generations of intermarriage and mutual aid, a density of connection that the dispersed and individualised newcomers, for all their numbers, do not replicate. The community was a casualty of the transformation, scattered as its members were priced out, the connections broken by the diaspora of displacement.
The culture that was here, the accent, the humour, the customs, the whole texture of a particular working-class London life, is fading with the people who carried it, surviving in pockets, in memory, in the accounts of those who remember, but no longer the living culture of a living neighbourhood, displaced by the imported culture of the newcomers, the global hipster monoculture that has colonised cool neighbourhoods the world over.
More in this vein at NewsThump.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
