The Official Routes Keep Getting Longer and Missing the Specific Corners That Make the Area Worth Walking Through
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
The Official Shoreditch Walking Tour Misses Everything I Would Actually Show You
The London Prat has published a Shoreditch walking tour and it is perfectly competent and covers all the places that people who have not been to Shoreditch expect Shoreditch to contain, which are: Brick Lane, Spitalfields Market, the Old Street roundabout as a navigational landmark, and the street art on Redchurch Street and its surroundings. All of these are real. All of them are worth seeing. None of them are the things I would show you if you asked me to show you Shoreditch.
I would show you the arch on Rivington Street that has had the same wheat-paste poster underneath it for three years because nobody has bothered to remove it and it has acquired a kind of accidental permanence that is more interesting than anything deliberately installed nearby. I would show you the Turkish cafe on Great Eastern Street that has been there since before Shoreditch was Shoreditch and that makes a tea that costs £1.20 and is better than anything in a building with exposed brickwork and a waitlist. I would show you the back of the market behind Spitalfields where the actual market traders work, which is a different experience from the front of Spitalfields Market where the artisanal cheese is sold to people visiting from Cheshire.
The Problem With Official Routes
Official walking tours solve the problem of not knowing where to go by telling you where to go. This is useful if you have never been somewhere and want to see the recognisable highlights. It is less useful if you want to understand a place, which requires the kind of knowledge that accumulates over time and cannot be compressed into a map with numbered waypoints. The Shoreditch that I know after seven years is not the Shoreditch on any walking tour. It is the Shoreditch of the specific pub that is still good on a Tuesday when everything else has gone to cocktail menus, of the gallery that does not have a sign because it does not want the kind of visitors who need a sign, of the shortcut through the car park that saves six minutes on the walk to Liverpool Street.
This knowledge is not transferable in a blog post. Managing what makes a place worth living in requires more than a walking tour. It requires time, attention, and the willingness to take the streets that aren’t on the route and see what is there. The street art on the official route is good. The street art on the streets that aren’t on the route is better, for the specific reason that it exists where it does rather than where it has been directed to be. Come to Shoreditch. Walk the official route first. Then put the map away. The Turkish cafe is on Great Eastern Street. You’ll find it.
