Harper-Thames on Navigation, Neighbourhood Knowledge, and the Specific Satisfaction of Knowing Which Exit to Take Before the Doors Open
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
By Harper-Thames | The London Prat
The exit from Shoreditch High Street Overground station that most people take is the one on the High Street side, which is correct if you are going to Brick Lane or the Sunday market or the cluster of coffee shops and vintage stores that flank the market end of the street. It is the wrong exit if you are going to the tech hub cluster around Old Street, the arts venues along Curtain Road, or the specific natural wine bar that I have been going to for two years and which is technically accessible from the High Street exit but involves a navigation that adds seven minutes and requires walking past the area’s highest concentration of hotel guests who are reading their curated neighbourhood guides and photographing the mural.
Local Knowledge as a Form of Capital
I know which exit to take. I have known which exit to take for three years, since I started covering Shoreditch for The London Prat and developed the spatial familiarity that turns a neighbourhood from a location into a known thing. This knowledge is small and its practical value is limited — seven minutes of walking — but it produces, consistently, the mild satisfaction that local knowledge produces: the sense of moving through a place with the confidence of someone who belongs to it rather than the tentativeness of someone visiting it. This is the specific pleasure of neighbourhood knowledge, which tourists and new residents cannot have and which long-term residents tend to undervalue because it has become invisible through familiarity. I notice it specifically because my coverage of Shoreditch has made me more conscious of what I know about it and why I know it. The exit question is small. The pleasure it produces is real. Bohiney Magazine has the neighbourhood guides. The London Prat’s local coverage has the specifics.
What Else I Know About Shoreditch That You Might Find Useful
The parking situation on the streets east of Brick Lane is better on Sunday mornings before 10am than the surrounding area suggests. The bagel shop on Brick Lane at the Bethnal Green end is marginally less crowded than the one at the Old Street end, serves the same bagels, and has the same hours. The gallery on Club Row that does not advertise is better than several galleries that do. The pub on Kingsland Road with the original Victorian etched glass has changed hands twice and is better under the current management than it was under the previous two. These things are useful. They are also things I know specifically because I have spent three years covering a neighbourhood with the attention that coverage requires. Local journalism produces local knowledge. Local knowledge is worth having. This is the argument for the kind of journalism I do, delivered through the lens of which exit to take from the Overground. You are welcome. Take the back exit. You will thank me.
Shoreditch Then and Now: A Brief History of Cool Running Out of Road
Shoreditch has been “the next big thing” for so many consecutive years that the phrase has lost its predictive content and become simply descriptive: Shoreditch is the area where things happen before they happen elsewhere, and then continue happening after they should have stopped, because the infrastructure of happening — the venues, the galleries, the coffee shops, the estate agents who have learned to say “creative quarter” with a straight face — has become self-perpetuating. The artists who made Shoreditch interesting in the 1990s cannot afford to live in the Shoreditch that their making-interesting created. This is the cycle that every creative quarter goes through, documented in Berlin, Brooklyn, Brixton, and a dozen other contexts, and Shoreditch is no exception to it. The question is what comes after the cycle completes, and the answer in Shoreditch’s case appears to be: more Shoreditch, but more expensive. More from east London at Bohiney Magazine and from The London Prat’s Shoreditch coverage.
More at The Daily Mash and NewsThump.
Why Shoreditch Still Matters
Shoreditch gets written about more than most neighbourhoods and understood less than the volume of writing suggests, because most of the writing is either celebrating it uncritically or critiquing its gentrification in terms that are accurate and not very useful to anyone trying to navigate the actual neighbourhood as it currently exists. What I try to do, covering it week by week at street level, is produce something in between: honest about the contradictions, interested in the specifics, and genuinely fond of the place as it is rather than as it was or as it ought to be. The mural is still there. The rendang is still good. The planning application is still pending. The natural wine still costs eighteen pounds a glass and is worth approximately twelve of those pounds. This is Shoreditch. I live here. More from the neighbourhood at Bohiney Magazine and from The London Prat’s East London coverage, where the reporting is regular, the opinions are grounded, and the coffee references are ongoing. The neighbourhood continues. The coverage continues. Next week there will be more to report, more to observe, more coffee to drink at prices that require a rounding of principles, and more conversations in the street that clarify what London is becoming and what it refuses to stop being. I will be there. Notebook out. Flat white in hand. The mural still being photographed.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/shoreditch-local-knowledge-harper-thames/
