Harper-Thames on the Demographic Composition of Her Local Neighbourhood, the Social Dynamics of Shared Space, and What Happens When Two Very Different Ideas of What Shoreditch Is For Occupy the Same Natural Wine Bar
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
By Harper-Thames | The London Prat
The Shoreditch natural wine bar on a Thursday evening contains, in roughly equal proportion, people who work in technology and people who work in the arts, a demographic composition that produces a social dynamic that I have been observing for two years with the specific fascination that journalists develop for situations that reveal larger truths through small ones. The tech workers and the artists both chose Shoreditch. They chose it for different reasons — the tech workers because it is proximate to the tech cluster around Old Street and Silicon Roundabout, and because the neighbourhood’s energy and amenity make it an appealing place to work and socialise; the artists because it is (or was, before the tech workers arrived) the kind of neighbourhood where artists live, where studios are accessible, where the aesthetic is sympathetic to creative work. Both sets of people are now in the same wine bar, drinking the same natural wine, at the same prices, and their coexistence is mostly peaceful and occasionally involves a conversation about rent that neither party enjoys but that both understand is the correct conversation to be having.
What Each Group Thinks the Other Thinks About Them
The artists, in my observation, generally think the tech workers are nice people who have made the neighbourhood unaffordable and who consume the cultural product of the neighbourhood (the galleries, the music events, the bars) without contributing to the cultural ecosystem that produces it. This is not entirely fair, because several tech workers are also photographers, musicians, or ceramicists in their free time, and several of them patronise the gallery on Arnold Circus in ways that contribute materially to its survival. The tech workers generally think the artists are interesting people whose presence makes the neighbourhood feel like a place worth being, and who occasionally make them feel slightly guilty about their salaries, which is an uncomfortable feeling that they manage by not examining it too carefully. Both of these characterisations are partial. Both are recognisable as descriptions of real dynamics. Bohiney Magazine has the data. The London Prat has the Saturday night version of this conversation.
The Accommodation That Has Been Reached
The accommodation that the Shoreditch natural wine bar has reached between these two populations is the accommodation that mixed demographics in expensive urban neighbourhoods always reach: shared space, self-selected segregation by time of day and venue type, occasional cross-demographic friendship formed at the specific nexus of the neighbourly event or the bar conversation that goes on too long, and a general agreement, unspoken, not to have the rent conversation at the bar unless one party initiates it. It works. It is slightly tense. It produces the specific energy of a neighbourhood that is in transition and has not yet decided what it is becoming. I will continue to report from the bar. The wine is good. The conversations are interesting. The rent remains the rent.
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-tech-artist-coexistence-harper-thames/
