Harper-Thames Attempts to Understand the Actual Population of a Neighbourhood That Is Described Primarily by the People Visiting It
The journalism about Shoreditch is almost entirely written by people who visit Shoreditch rather than by people who live in it, a category that includes me on my more honest days, because I live close enough to Shoreditch to call it my neighbourhood in conversation without it being quite true in the way that counts. The people who actually live in the postcode — EC2A, N1 in its eastern portions, E2 — are a more varied population than the coverage suggests. I spent two weeks on park benches and at bus stops attempting an informal demographic survey that no academic institution would recognize as methodology but that produced, through accumulated conversation, a picture that the lifestyle journalism about the area consistently underweights.
The Shoreditch council estate population is significant and visible if you are looking at the right streets. The Boundary Estate on Arnold Circus — built in the 1890s as the first council estate in Britain, a fact that gives it both historical significance and an architectural quality that the newer developments around it do not match — is home to several hundred council tenants whose relationship to the neighbourhood’s coffee shop economy is the relationship of people who live next to an economy rather than in it. The Turkish and Bangladeshi communities in the streets between Shoreditch High Street and Bethnal Green Road are present in the food and in the shops in ways that the weekend tourism does not always engage with. The young professional renters — tech workers, designers, people in the creative industries in various combinations — are the visible demographic of the bars and coffee shops and are, in terms of residential tenure, the most recent and most mobile of the neighbourhood’s populations. Shoreditch is all of these simultaneously. The coverage typically picks one. More from me at Harper-Thames.
SOURCE: http://prat.UK
