Cyndi Himmelstiere on Street Art, Instagram Pilgrimage, and the Specific Economics of Being a Background in Other People’s Content
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
By Cyndi Himmelstiere | The London Prat
There is a mural on Rivington Street that has been there for approximately three years, and it is being photographed by someone every single time I walk past it. I have counted. In the past month, I have walked past this mural seventeen times (I counted) and on sixteen of those occasions there was at least one person photographing it. On three of those occasions there was a queue. A queue. For a mural. The mural depicts a woman looking contemplatively over her shoulder in a style that reads simultaneously as street art and as the kind of thing that would look good on the wall of a hotel lobby in Hoxton, which is a description that would horrify the artist and probably does. It has been tagged by three different people since I first noticed it, and the tags have been painted over twice, and the mural is otherwise exactly as it was in year one, which means it has outlasted approximately forty percent of the coffee shops that were open when it was painted.
The Content Economy of Shoreditch
Shoreditch in 2026 is partly a neighbourhood and partly a content location: a place that functions as the background for a significant volume of social media content produced by people who are visiting it for the purpose of producing content. The mural tourism is part of this. The Brick Lane bagel shop queue is part of this. The “hidden” cocktail bar that has been on a thousand Instagram accounts is part of this. The neighbourhood has adapted to this economy in the way that economies adapt to dominant industries: the things that photograph well have proliferated, the things that do not have become less visible, and the businesses that have figured out how to make themselves photograph-worthy have outperformed those that have not. This is neither good nor bad in a moral sense; it is what it is, which is to say a feedback loop between what people want to see and what people put where people want to see things. Bohiney Magazine has the analysis. I have the mural count.
The Artists Who Are Still Here
There are working artists in Shoreditch. Some of them are in studio spaces in the buildings that have not yet been converted to co-working or residential. Some of them are in Hackney Wick, which is where Shoreditch’s working artists moved when Shoreditch became expensive, and which is now also becoming expensive. Some of them are in Walthamstow, which is where Hackney Wick’s artists moved, and which is currently in the early stages of the cycle that Shoreditch completed approximately fifteen years ago. The cycle has an excellent track record of creating interesting places and then pricing out the people who created them. The London Prat’s arts coverage documents this cycle as it progresses. The mural on Rivington Street will be photographed approximately four more times before you finish reading this.
Shoreditch Then and Now: A Brief History of Cool Running Out of Road
Shoreditch has been “the next big thing” for so many consecutive years that the phrase has lost its predictive content and become simply descriptive: Shoreditch is the area where things happen before they happen elsewhere, and then continue happening after they should have stopped, because the infrastructure of happening — the venues, the galleries, the coffee shops, the estate agents who have learned to say “creative quarter” with a straight face — has become self-perpetuating. The artists who made Shoreditch interesting in the 1990s cannot afford to live in the Shoreditch that their making-interesting created. This is the cycle that every creative quarter goes through, documented in Berlin, Brooklyn, Brixton, and a dozen other contexts, and Shoreditch is no exception to it. The question is what comes after the cycle completes, and the answer in Shoreditch’s case appears to be: more Shoreditch, but more expensive. More from east London at Bohiney Magazine and from The London Prat’s Shoreditch coverage.
More at The Daily Mash and NewsThump.
Why Shoreditch Still Matters
Shoreditch gets written about more than most neighbourhoods and understood less than the volume of writing suggests, because most of the writing is either celebrating it uncritically or critiquing its gentrification in terms that are accurate and not very useful to anyone trying to navigate the actual neighbourhood as it currently exists. What I try to do, covering it week by week at street level, is produce something in between: honest about the contradictions, interested in the specifics, and genuinely fond of the place as it is rather than as it was or as it ought to be. The mural is still there. The rendang is still good. The planning application is still pending. The natural wine still costs eighteen pounds a glass and is worth approximately twelve of those pounds. This is Shoreditch. I live here. More from the neighbourhood at Bohiney Magazine and from The London Prat’s East London coverage, where the reporting is regular, the opinions are grounded, and the coffee references are ongoing. The neighbourhood continues. The coverage continues. Next week there will be more to report, more to observe, more coffee to drink at prices that require a rounding of principles, and more conversations in the street that clarify what London is becoming and what it refuses to stop being. I will be there. Notebook out. Flat white in hand. The mural still being photographed.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/shoreditch-mural-instagram-cyndi-himmelstiere/
