On members clubs, who they include, who they exclude, and the complicated role they play in a neighbourhood that built its identity on openness
Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat — Cyndi Himmelstiere on the sociology of Shoreditch.
I want to talk about members clubs, and specifically about the one that sits at the top of the street in a converted factory and is, by any reasonable measure, excellent: a rooftop pool, good food, event spaces, all of it beautifully done. I have been inside three times, invited by members, and each time I have had a very pleasant experience and left feeling slightly uncomfortable about it, which I am aware is a self-indulgent position and am going to explore anyway because I live in Shoreditch and this is the kind of thing Shoreditch makes you think about whether you want to or not.
The Enclave Function
A members club is, structurally, an enclave. It is a space that provides the good things of the city — food, drink, company, amenity — to a defined population with the capacity to pay for membership, and it does so in a way that is explicitly exclusive, which is its entire value proposition. The exclusivity is not incidental; it is the product. The thing you are paying for is access to a space that not everyone has access to, which means you are paying, in part, for the absence of people who cannot afford to be there. This is not a criticism; it is an accurate description of how the model works, and the model works very well.
The Neighbourhood Question
The question I keep returning to is what a members club does to a neighbourhood that built its identity on a particular kind of openness — the openness of the studio, the warehouse party, the market stall that anyone could approach. Shoreditch was not actually open in every sense; it had its own exclusivities based on social connection rather than money. But there was a theoretical openness: if you were curious and willing to show up, you could usually get in. The members club is more honest about its exclusivity, and less accessible, and I am not sure whether that honesty makes it better or worse.
The Building Itself
The building is genuinely beautiful. It is the kind of adaptive reuse that East London does well: a Victorian industrial structure repurposed with evident care, the bones of the original kept and the new layers added without apology. I can admire the architecture while having complicated feelings about the function it now serves, which is again the position I tend to occupy in relation to most things in Shoreditch. The neighbourhood produces this kind of doubleness constantly: the thing is good and the conditions of its existence are difficult, and you live with both because that is what living here means.
Where I Have Landed
I have not resolved this. I notice that people who live in the neighbourhood are divided in ways that do not map neatly onto any politics I recognise: some people who are broadly progressive find the club fine, some people who are broadly conservative find it offensive, and the reverse is equally true. The building is beautiful. The roof pool is very nice. The neighbourhood is different because of it. I hold all of these simultaneously and accept that I am not going to reach a clean position, which is perhaps the most Shoreditch thing I have said in this piece. Shoreditch is a place that produces precisely this: the question without the answer, the appreciation without the resolution, the life in the interesting contradiction.
For more from Cyndi Himmelstiere on Shoreditch life, visit Cyndi Himmelstiere. More on London social geography at The Guardian.
The question of what a neighbourhood owes its members clubs and what its members clubs owe it is rarely asked, because clubs by definition exist outside the neighbourhood in a social sense even when they are physically inside it. The club creates its own context, its own community of members, its own geography of approved destinations, and the street outside is scenery rather than setting. The neighbours who are not members are aware of the building in the way that people are aware of expensive restaurants: they know it exists, they may occasionally notice the people going in and coming out, and it has no direct effect on their lives except insofar as the rent increases that follow in its wake.
What I actually want, if I am honest about it, is not the closure of the members club but something more like a membrane — a way for the wealth and energy it contains to leak into the neighbourhood around it, in the form of local employment, community events, engagement with the streets it occupies. Some clubs do this, to their credit. Others are genuinely insular in a way that seems both unnecessary and slightly wasteful of the position they occupy. The converted factory on my street could be many things. It has chosen to be one. I find that I wish it had chosen to be more.
The building on my street was industrial before it was exclusive, and before that it was something else, and the neighbourhood it sits in has been remade several times over by forces that had nothing to do with the wishes of the people who lived there. This is the history of Shoreditch, compressed into a single block. The members club is not the end of the story; it is the current chapter, and chapters end.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk/
