Cyndi Himmelstiere Documents the Things That Have Survived Four Years of Change in Her Postcode and Are Still What They Were
What Remains Genuine in E1
Four years of living in E1 and watching the changes that have turned parts of Shoreditch from genuinely weird to expensively weird to aspirationally weird to what I can only describe as competently curated weirdness four years of this and I am making a list of what has survived. Not a nostalgic list. A factual one. Things that are still what they were when I arrived, or things that are new but are genuinely themselves rather than performing being themselves.
The Bangladeshi and South Asian restaurants on and around Brick Lane are still genuinely excellent, still primarily serving a community rather than a tourist market, still priced at a level that reflects their actual function. The cafes run by the Bangladeshi community that have been there for thirty years are not artisanal and do not describe themselves as anything. They serve tea and food to people who want tea and food, which is what restaurants are for. I go to them regularly. They are some of the best meals I eat.
The studio buildings around Hoxton Square still have artists in them. Not predominantly. The economics have been against this for years. But enough that when you see someone carrying a canvas on a Tuesday morning you are not automatically assuming they are carrying it decoratively. The art is still happening. It is happening in smaller spaces, for different budgets, with different economics than a decade ago, but it is happening, and the specific density of creative people that makes a neighbourhood generative is still present in E1 in a way that is not guaranteed and that should not be taken for granted.
East London life at The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine. East London culture at MyLondon. Further at santaclaus.top and Shoreditch UK Bluesky. Neighbourhood commentary at Newsthump.
A Note on Remaining Genuine
The things that have remained genuine in E1 share a common characteristic: they serve a community rather than an audience. The Bangladeshi restaurants serve their neighbourhood. The studios serve their artists. The market at 6:30 serves its buyers. The venues that have survived without becoming performances are the ones that remained focused on their actual function rather than their cultural signal. This is not a lesson that helps most businesses the economic pressure in Shoreditch pushes toward the audience-serving model because the audience has more money than the community and is willing to pay for the experience of a neighbourhood it doesn’t fully live in. But the community-serving businesses that have survived despite that pressure are the ones that make Shoreditch still worth living in rather than just visiting, and they deserve acknowledgment rather than the ambient treatment of being taken for granted until they’re gone, at which point they become what everyone was nostalgic about.
This neighbourhood continues to be worth the complicated feelings it produces. The complications are part of it. You cannot live in a place that is changing this fast without being part of the change and being slightly implicated in it and finding this uncomfortable and continuing to live here anyway. This is the specific experience of East London in the 2020s. It is not comfortable. It is extremely interesting. Both things simultaneously, which is probably the most honest description of Shoreditch I am capable of writing, and I have been trying for four years.
Four years in E1 and I have settled into the neighbourhood’s contradictions rather than trying to resolve them. The expensive cocktails and the Bangladeshi restaurants coexist one street apart and serve different communities that overlap in ways I find interesting and that produce a neighbourhood that is richer than either alone would be. The artists and the engineers share a postcode and occasionally a bar and apparently a ceramicist who also thinks about planning reform. The market at 6:30 and the market at 10:30 are the same market serving different purposes in the same street. All of this is Shoreditch, all of it simultaneously, and living in it requires holding all of it at once without resolving it into a simpler story. I have been practicing this for four years. I am getting better at it. The neighbourhood continues to give me material. This is a good arrangement for a writer, and possibly for anyone who wants to understand how cities actually work when they’re working properly which is to say, messily, for multiple people, at multiple price points, without anyone fully controlling the outcome.
The neighbourhood persists because it still has enough of what it was to be worth living in while also having enough of what it has become to sustain the economic base that the original version couldn’t maintain. This is the trajectory of all generative urban districts and it does not have a happier ending than this: they become expensive, they become curated, they become destinations, and then they become former versions of themselves that are commemorated on plaques and in retrospective journalism written by people who were there, of whom I am going to be one eventually, writing about this period the way the people who were here in the nineties write about that one. I am aware of this. I am here now. The coffee is still the best. I am making the most of it.
