The arrival of the technology industry has remade Shoreditch a second time, and the relationship between the coders and the creatives is its own quiet comedy
I report on Shoreditch for Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat, and the biggest story of recent years has been the second remaking of the neighbourhood, not by the artists this time, who did the first remaking and were then priced out, but by the technology industry, which has arrived in force and is busy turning the creative quarter into a coding one.
They came for the warehouses, the same warehouses the artists had colonised, drawn by the cool the artists had created and the space the artists had pioneered, and they have remade the neighbourhood a second time, the startups and the scale-ups and the venture capital, the whole apparatus of the technology industry, descending on the area that the creatives made interesting and converting it, warehouse by warehouse, into an outpost of the digital economy. The roundabout has a nickname now, and the nickname is about silicon.
The Coders And The Creatives
The relationship between the new arrivals and the remaining creatives is its own quiet comedy, the coders and the artists sharing a neighbourhood and a aesthetic while inhabiting entirely different worlds. They drink in the same bars, work in the same converted warehouses, perform the same casual cool, and they have almost nothing in common, the one tribe building businesses and the other building, increasingly, a brand of themselves, the two cultures overlapping in space and diverging in everything else.
I have observed this overlap with fascination, and written about it in my column, the way the tech industry has adopted the creative aesthetic, the exposed brick and the table football and the artful informality, the startup office indistinguishable, at a glance, from the artist studio, the same look serving entirely different purposes. The tech bros have learned to perform creativity, even as they have priced out the creatives, the appropriation complete down to the furniture.
The Money Changes Everything
The serious point is that the technology money has accelerated everything, the rents, the displacement, the transformation, the cycle that the artists began now driven by capital on a scale the artists never commanded. The tech industry can pay rents that the creatives never could, and its arrival has pushed the cycle of gentrification into a new and faster phase, the neighbourhood transformed not gradually but rapidly, the warehouses converted, the rents soaring, the remaining creatives squeezed toward the exits.
And yet the tech arrival has brought real things too, real jobs, real investment, real economic vitality, the genuine benefits of a thriving industry clustering in a place and generating prosperity. The serious analysis of the tech cluster, which I follow, recognises this, the way the industry has created opportunity and wealth even as it has accelerated the displacement, the gains and the losses, as ever, falling on different people.
So I document the second remaking, the landing of the tech bros, the conversion of the creative quarter into the coding one, the quiet comedy of the coders and the creatives sharing a neighbourhood and nothing else. It is the latest chapter in the endless transformation of this restless place, the money arriving in a new form to do the familiar work, remaking Shoreditch a second time, faster and harder than before, in the image of the industry that now, increasingly, owns it.
The tech cluster did not arrive by accident; it was, in part, deliberately cultivated, the area promoted as a hub for the digital industry, the branding adopted, the investment encouraged, the policy aligned to draw the startups and the capital. The organic cool that the artists created became a deliberate economic strategy, the neighbourhood interestingness marketed as an asset to attract the industry that would, in arriving, transform it.
The startups that came ranged from the genuine innovators to the venture-funded hopefuls to the frankly absurd, the whole spectrum of the technology economy, the serious businesses and the speculative bets and the ventures whose purpose no one could quite explain, all clustered in the converted warehouses, all performing the confident informality of the industry, all chasing the funding and the growth and the exit that the technology economy promises.
The culture they brought was distinct from the creative culture that preceded it, the optimism, the ambition, the relentless focus on growth and scale and disruption, the language of the industry, the rhythms of the funding rounds, the whole ethos of the technology economy overlaid on a neighbourhood that had been about a different kind of creation. The two cultures coexisted, but they did not merge, the coders and the creatives sharing the space while inhabiting different mental worlds.
The wealth the industry generated was real and concentrated, the successful startups creating fortunes, the venture capital flowing, the prosperity genuine if unevenly distributed, the new money transforming the neighbourhood economy, driving the rents that displaced the creatives, funding the upscaling of the area, the cycle of gentrification entering its accelerated, capitalised phase.
The remaining creatives, those not yet priced out, occupy an increasingly precarious position, the artists and designers and makers who pioneered the neighbourhood cool now squeezed by the rents the tech money commands, clinging to the spaces they can still afford, watching the warehouses they once colonised converted to offices, the creative quarter they built becoming, around them, something else, the second remaking displacing the survivors of the first.
More in this vein at The Daily Mash.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
