Cyndi investigates the East London independent retail resilience that bucks the national trend
Satire from Bohiney.com and prat.uk.
By Cyndi Himmelstiere | The London Prat
The national story about the British high street is a story of closure, contraction, and the ongoing replacement of independent retail by either large chains or empty units, depending on the location. This story is real and is supported by data that shows independent retail under sustained pressure from online competition, commercial rent inflation, business rates, and the general structural disadvantage of a single-location business competing in a market where scale is the primary competitive advantage. I am aware of this story. I cover it when it manifests in Shoreditch. What I also observe, on the streets I walk every day, is that Shoreditch has a level of independent retail density that defies the national narrative, and I have been trying to understand why.
The short answer is that Shoreditch’s independent retail survives because its customer base specifically prefers it. The demographic that lives in and visits Shoreditch — creative professionals, tech workers, the broader population of people who moved here for the culture and are paying premium rents to remain near it — has a specific and active preference for the independent over the chain that is not just stated preference but revealed preference, demonstrated by actually spending money in independent shops at prices that are not always lower than the chain equivalent. This is unusual. Most consumers state a preference for independents and demonstrate a preference for convenience, which the chains exploit more efficiently. Shoreditch consumers follow through on the preference at a rate that makes the economics work for a meaningful number of independents.
The Specific Shops
There is a bookshop near Bethnal Green Road that I visit with the frequency of a person who buys more books than she reads and has made peace with this situation as a feature of her personality rather than a failure of her organisation. The owner is knowledgeable in the specific way of people who have spent decades with books and has opinions that he shares willingly and that are worth hearing. There is a record shop on Kingsland Road that has the specific quality of record shops that take music seriously — the kind where you can spend 45 minutes and leave with two albums you didn’t know you needed and a recommendation for a third that you’ll order next week. There is a vintage clothing shop that edits its stock with genuine curatorial intelligence rather than simply selling everything that arrives.
These shops survive because they offer something that the online market and the chains don’t: the specific human expertise and the serendipitous discovery that physical retail, at its best, provides. They are not surviving despite being small. They are surviving partly because they are small, because their smallness allows the kind of specific focus and curatorial quality that scale tends to eliminate. The London Prat supports the independents. The Daily Mash covers the national high street decline. Shoreditch is not the national story. It is a specific story about a specific place and a specific customer base that makes the economics work. It is worth noting because the exceptions to the national story are where the solutions tend to be found, if anyone is paying attention.
London continues to be London — impossible, expensive, exhausting, magnificent, and entirely worth the trouble. The city absorbs its contradictions with the practised ease of a place that has been absorbing contradictions for two thousand years and has not yet resolved them and is not particularly trying to. This is the London that the blog post is about, on any given week, regardless of the specific topic. The specific topic is the entry point. London is the subject.
The city keeps moving. So does the writing. Both are better for the other.
Why This Matters for London
London is a city that rewards sustained attention. The first visit gives you the monuments and the museums. The second gives you the neighbourhoods. The third gives you the rhythms — the way the city moves through its week, the difference between a Tuesday morning and a Saturday afternoon, the specific energy of each season and each district. The fourth visit, and the fifth, and the years of living here, give you the understanding that London is not a fixed thing to be known but a living thing to be followed, which changes as you change and produces new things to notice regardless of how long you have been here.
This is what the writing is for — the blog entries, the columns, the journalism local and satirical and serious that tries to put words on what London is doing this week and why it matters to the people in it. The city is too large for complete coverage. The attempt is worth making. Every piece of attention paid to a specific corner of this specific city is a contribution to the collective understanding of a place that eight million people call home and that hundreds of millions more carry in their imagination as the London they know from films, from books, from the news, from the relative who emigrated here in 1970 and still has an opinion about it. The real London and the imagined London coexist. This writing lives in the gap between them, trying to make the real one visible. That is the project. It continues.
East End reading: The Daily Mash | NewsThump
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com
