Cyndi Himmelstiere on the property market that has transformed the social geography of East London, the neighbour she never sees, and what it means to live in a neighbourhood that exists in two parallel economic realities simultaneously
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
The flat above mine is currently listed on Rightmove for three thousand and two hundred pounds per month. I know this because the landlord sent a notification to all building residents advising us that he was updating the listing and asking for our cooperation if any viewings needed to be arranged, a communication that contained more information about the property market than it was designed to convey and that I read approximately four times with the expression of someone doing mathematics they would prefer not to do.
Three thousand and two hundred pounds is more than my parents paid for their house in 1987, monthly, to rent a flat, in a building I also live in, in a neighbourhood that seventeen years ago was considered slightly risky for people who looked like they had anything worth stealing. Both of these things are true. I am not sure what to do with both of them being true simultaneously, except to write about it, which is my response to most things that I cannot do anything about.
The Social Geography of the New Shoreditch
The Shoreditch that exists in the higher end of the rental market is populated by people who are here for specific and often temporary reasons: the American tech employee on a London posting, the finance worker who wants the creative neighbourhood rather than the Canary Wharf flat, the couple splitting the cost of what would be unaffordable for either individually. These are not bad people or unwelcome people. They are people for whom Shoreditch is a location within their London experience rather than the neighbourhood they have built their London life in, and the distinction matters for the texture of the community.
The neighbour who is moving into the flat above mine — I have not yet met them but the estate agent described them as a “young professional couple” in the language of an industry that has developed a euphemistic vocabulary for the socioeconomic filtering it performs — will be in this building for the duration of a lease. Whether they stay longer depends on whether their circumstances align with what the market asks. The people who have been in this building for longer than a single lease cycle are the people for whom Shoreditch is home in the sense that home means the place you intend to stay, and they are fewer with each year that the property market maintains its current trajectory.
What This Does to a Neighbourhood
There is a version of the gentrification argument that focuses on individual economic benefit — the existing owner whose property value has increased, the incoming resident who has access to an improving neighbourhood — and treats the social consequences as an acceptable externality of a market that is simply doing what markets do. There is another version that focuses on what is lost when the population of a neighbourhood turns over faster than community can form: when the people who shop at the corner shop and know the owner’s name and have seen the street change over twenty years are replaced by people who are grateful for the convenience and do not stay long enough to become part of what makes it convenient.
I do not know my neighbour above me. I have not known any neighbour in that flat for longer than eighteen months in the six years I have been in this building, because the market price means that whoever is there is there on terms that rarely permit stability. The building has a WhatsApp group that I am in. I do not know who most of the names in it belong to. This is partly my failure to make more effort and partly the structural reality of a building where population turnover is high enough that making the effort produces diminishing returns. Sixteen years ago, when I first moved to Shoreditch, I knew my neighbours. I knew them not because I was a better person then — though possibly the neighbourhood was — but because we were all there for similar reasons and for similar durations and the conditions for community formation existed. The conditions have changed. The community formations have changed with them. Three thousand and two hundred pounds per month is not just a rent. It is the price of a kind of place that used to be this neighbourhood and that the market has decided it can no longer afford.
The building that contains my flat and the three thousand and two hundred pound flat above me is itself a product of the area’s history that I find oddly comforting when I think about it properly. It was built in the 1920s as industrial space. It was converted to residential use in the late 1990s when the area’s industrial function was declining and the residential function was beginning. The conversion happened at a price point that allowed people like me — not wealthy, earning a living wage in a creative industry, looking for somewhere central that I could afford — to move into it. It will, at some point in the probably not distant future, be at a price point where people like me cannot afford to move into it even if we wanted to, because the market trajectory of this postcode is not ambiguous. The building will still be here. It will contain different people. They will live in the neighbourhood in the way that the people who can afford the neighbourhood at its current price point live in it, which is well and without the specific anxiety that comes from occupying a postcode at the edge of what your income allows. That is probably fine for them. The building and the street will have different conversations than the ones they are having now. The street has had different conversations before. The Huguenot weavers, the Jewish families, the Bangladeshi community, the artists, the tech workers, the expensive cocktail bars — the street has absorbed all of them and continued. It will absorb whatever comes next. The three thousand and two hundred pounds is just the current chapter. The street remembers longer than any chapter lasts.
Cyndi Himmelstiere writes from Shoreditch for The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine. Her homepage is at prat.uk/author/himmelstiere.
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SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/shoreditch-flat-costs-more-than-parents-house-cyndi-himmelstiere/
