Harper-Thames on the Specific Joy of Discovering a Place Before the Algorithm Does and the Impossibility of Keeping It
Reported by Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
By Harper-Thames | ShoreRoar.com
There is a courtyard off Bethnal Green Road — I am being deliberately vague because the courtyard is currently excellent and I am not yet willing to contribute to the process by which excellent things in East London become the subject of a Time Out listicle and subsequently become merely good, and then average, and then the sort of place that people who visit them describe as “a bit touristy now, shame” — where someone has installed a coffee kiosk, two food traders whose menus change weekly, and exactly the right number of mismatched outdoor tables to accommodate the people who have found it without creating the queue that finding it produces when too many people find it simultaneously.
I found it eight months ago. I go every Saturday morning. The coffee is excellent. One of the food traders makes something with eggs and flatbread and a sauce that I could describe in more detail but will not because the description would be more identifying than the address. The other trader changes weekly — sometimes Vietnamese, sometimes something I cannot categorise that has influence from at least three culinary traditions and tastes coherent anyway, because the person making it is a good cook and good cooking transcends the anxiety of categorisation. There are usually about twenty people there on a Saturday morning. Twenty is the right number. Twenty is the number at which a courtyard is a community rather than a crowd.
The Discovery Economy of East London
East London has a specific discovery economy: a continuous cycle of new food and drink operations, creative spaces, markets, and experiences emerging in the gaps between the established destinations, operating under the radar of the mainstream recommendation infrastructure until they are found by enough people to register on social media, at which point they attract the recommendation articles, and then the queues, and then the pricing adjustment that the queue justifies, and then the slight disappointment of the people who arrive after the queue that the thing is not as special as the people who found it before the queue said it was. The thing has not changed. The context has changed. The context is everything to the experience. Twenty people in a courtyard is a discovery. Two hundred people in the same courtyard is a queue. The courtyard is the same courtyard.
The discovery cycle is not a reason not to discover things. It is not a reason for the smug closure of someone who has found a thing and refuses to share it on the grounds that sharing would ruin it. It is, more accurately, a reason to keep discovering — to keep looking for the next courtyard, the next kiosk, the next thing that has not yet been found by enough people to become a destination, because the finding is itself the pleasure and the finding is available in East London in quantities that the discovery cycle does not exhaust as fast as you might fear. I found the courtyard eight months ago. I expect to keep going until the Saturday when the queue has arrived and then I will write a piece about the queue, and then I will find somewhere else, and the finding will be as good as the courtyard was.
What It Gives You That Other Things Don’t
The specific pleasure of the as-yet-undiscovered place is the pleasure of being a participant in rather than a consumer of a thing that is still being created. The courtyard at twenty people feels like something that is happening because the people there are making it happen by being there. The courtyard at two hundred people feels like something that is happening despite the people there, who have arrived to consume an experience that exists independently of their presence. This is the difference between being part of something and being an audience for it, and the difference is real and is the reason why the discovery pleasure exists and why it is impossible to replicate once the thing being discovered has been discovered enough to become a destination.
East London’s creative ecology produces this experience reliably — not because East London is uniquely creative, though it is genuinely creative, but because the combination of relatively affordable (by London standards) commercial spaces, a density of people with creative and culinary ambitions, and the specific cultural permission that the area gives to experimental and low-infrastructure operations produces a continuous supply of new things to find. According to the Greater London Authority‘s cultural economy research, East London has maintained its position as the densest cluster of creative economy businesses in Europe despite the gentrification pressures that have been documented at length. The creative ecology persists. The new things continue to appear. The courtyards continue to exist before the queues arrive. Go and find them. I am not going to tell you where mine is, but yours is out there. It’s probably off a road you walk along regularly and have never looked down.
Harper-Thames writes about Shoreditch and East London. Her homepage is at The London Prat.
For more East London discoveries and observations, visit NewsThump.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
