Cyndi Himmelstiere on the Silicon Roundabout era, the standing desks, the cold brew, the ping pong tables, and the decade-long cultural negotiation between people who code and people who make things
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
In approximately 2010, someone — I have never been able to definitively identify who, though several people have claimed credit — named the area around Old Street roundabout “Silicon Roundabout,” in a piece of rebranding that was either inspired or cringe-inducing depending on your relationship with the self-conscious aspiration of British technology boosterism. The name stuck. The government adopted it. David Cameron visited. The tech sector that had been quietly growing in the converted warehouses of Shoreditch and the railway arches around Old Street suddenly had a brand, and the brand attracted investment, and the investment attracted more tech companies, and within three years Shoreditch was home to several thousand people who owned ergonomic keyboards and strong opinions about programming languages, which was a demographic the neighbourhood had not previously contained in significant numbers.
The First Impact
The initial cultural contact between the incoming tech sector and the existing Shoreditch creative community was awkward in the specific way that contact between two groups with incompatible aesthetic self-concepts tends to be. The artists and designers and musicians who had made Shoreditch their neighbourhood in the 1990s and 2000s had a relationship with the area that was built on deliberate distance from the mainstream economy. The tech workers were, in many cases, highly paid participants in a boom sector that was remaking the economy in ways the creative community was ambivalent about. They wore similar clothes and went to some of the same coffee shops and lived in the same postcodes, but they were in Shoreditch for different reasons and they experienced the neighbourhood differently.
The coffee shops were where the negotiation was most visible. The independent cafes of Shoreditch had developed a culture of extended occupation — the writer working on a novel, the designer working on a brief, the musician recovering from last night — that the incoming laptop-with-spreadsheet-and-video-call population joined without fully integrating into. The cafe that had been a community space with flexible terms about how long you could sit over a single flat white became, as the tech population grew, a contested resource between people who used it as an office and people who used it as a creative habitat, which look similar from the outside and feel very different from inside.
What Actually Happened
The curious thing that happened, which I did not predict in 2011 when the Silicon Roundabout narrative was in full boom, was that the tech sector and the creative community in Shoreditch did not separate into distinct and hostile camps. They mixed, in the way that people mix when they live in the same neighbourhood and use the same spaces and have enough in common in their economic position — relatively young, relatively educated, relatively financially comfortable relative to the London average — to find each other comprehensible. Designers started working for tech companies. Engineers started making art as a side project. The co-working spaces that opened to serve the tech sector turned out to also attract freelancers from the creative industries who needed desks but not full office infrastructure. The mixing was imperfect and the tensions remained, but the cultural ecology of Shoreditch absorbed the tech sector more successfully than anyone predicted at the time.
The neighbourhood has been more permanently shaped by the tech sector’s influence on commercial property than by its cultural influence. The office space that tech companies occupied increased demand and rents for commercial real estate in a way that affected all businesses in the area, including the creative businesses that predated the tech wave. The startups that graduated from co-working to leased offices moved into spaces that had previously housed studios and workshops, accelerating the displacement of the creative uses that had defined the neighbourhood. The tech sector did not, in most cases, deliberately displace the creative community. It simply occupied the space that was available, at prices that reflected its greater revenue per employee, and the creative community was displaced by the economics rather than by any intentional action. The result is the same regardless of the intention.
The cultural negotiation between the tech sector and the creative community has produced something that neither side fully anticipated: a hybrid economy in which the categories blur. The designer who works three days a week for a tech company and spends the other two days on independent creative projects is neither the tech worker nor the artist of the pre-tech Shoreditch but a combination that the neighbourhood’s current economy has enabled. The tech company that hires creative directors and invests in office aesthetics is neither the pure commercial enterprise nor the creative studio but something that has absorbed the aesthetics of the creative community while retaining the commercial logic of the tech sector. These hybrids are the dominant population of current Shoreditch, which is why the neighbourhood feels neither like what it was in the early 2000s nor like what the pure Silicon Roundabout narrative suggested it would become. The tech sector and the creative community have produced something together that resembles neither of them separately, which is interesting and somewhat unpredictable and probably the most honest description of what cultural mixing produces when it actually occurs rather than being managed toward a predetermined outcome. It is not the Shoreditch either group imagined. It is the Shoreditch that happened when they occupied the same space long enough for the space to change them both.
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/tech-bros-arrived-shoreditch-curious-thing-happened-cyndi-himmelstiere/
