Harper-Thames on the annual cycle of exhaustion, affection, irritation, and renewed commitment that defines her relationship with a neighbourhood she has been trying to leave for four years
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
Every spring, approximately when the weather gets good enough to make being outside feel like a choice rather than an endurance test, I decide that I have had enough of Shoreditch and that I am going to move somewhere quieter, somewhere with a different character, somewhere that does not contain a cocktail bar on every corner and a hen party on every pavement and a man explaining NFTs to another man outside a coffee shop at eleven in the morning on a Tuesday. I make this decision with considerable conviction. I research areas. I look at Rightmove listings. I have genuine conversations with friends about whether Peckham is now too similar to Shoreditch or still genuinely different, and about what Walthamstow is actually like rather than what the Sunday supplements say it is like, and about whether moving to Hackney would be moving or merely relocating within the same cultural ecosystem with a different tube line.
Every autumn I am still in Shoreditch. The move has not happened. I have a list of reasons — the ease of the commute, the proximity to friends who are also in the area, the specific coffee shop that I am attached to in a way that I recognise is unhealthy but do not intend to change — and none of them is quite true and all of them together are quite true.
What Keeps Happening
What keeps happening is that Shoreditch produces, with sufficient regularity to disrupt my departure plans, evenings or afternoons that remind me why I am here. The Saturday afternoon where I walked from the market through to Spitalfields and then down to Whitechapel and back up through Bethnal Green in the specific light that London does in September, when it is golden and horizontal and makes everything look as though someone has decided to be kind about it. The Wednesday evening when a friend texted to say there was a gallery opening on Redchurch Street and I went because it was seven minutes away and the wine was free, and the work was genuinely interesting and I talked to three people I had never met and one of them has become someone I see regularly. These things are not unique to Shoreditch. They could happen anywhere that has enough density of interesting things and interesting people and the specific urban freedom that comes from being in a place where nobody knows your name and you can be anyone.
But they happen here with enough frequency that the alternative — the quieter neighbourhood, the different tube line, the absence of the cocktail bar that I resent and the hen parties that I find exhausting — starts to look like it might also be the absence of the Saturday afternoon light and the Wednesday gallery and the coffee shop where the person who works on Tuesdays and Thursdays knows what I order and has it started when I walk through the door. The quieter neighbourhood has its own version of these things. I just do not know what they are yet. And Shoreditch, which I know, is right there.
The Actual Reason I Stay
The actual reason I stay is that I have been here long enough to have accumulated the kind of local knowledge that is not about destinations and recommendations but about the rhythm of the place: which Sunday the market is good, which coffee shop is too crowded on Saturday morning, which route through the back streets gets me to Spitalfields in eleven minutes instead of seventeen, which railway arch has the interesting mechanic who has been there since before the cocktail bars arrived and who will have a genuine conversation about whatever is in the news that morning. This knowledge is not transferable and it takes years to build, and building it again somewhere else is a real cost even though it is an invisible one.
I am going to move. I am probably not going to move this year. Shoreditch is exhausting and expensive and sometimes I feel entirely alien to the version of it that the tourists and the tech workers and the hen parties inhabit, and then the September light comes in low over the market and I walk somewhere new and arrive somewhere I already know and I do not move. This is the honest account of my relationship with a neighbourhood that I have been complaining about for longer than I have been writing about it. Both the complaining and the staying are sincere. The staying has won every year for the past four years. I expect it will win again this year. In the spring I will look at Rightmove. In the autumn I will still be here. The cycle continues. The coffee shop awaits.
The specific quality of Shoreditch that I am describing — the neighbourhood that you know well enough to navigate by its rhythms rather than its addresses — is not unique to Shoreditch. It is the quality of any place where you have lived long enough to accumulate local knowledge, and it is available in principle everywhere and in practice wherever you choose to build it. The reason I am still building it in Shoreditch rather than starting over somewhere else is that I have built enough of it here that starting over elsewhere feels like a larger sacrifice than it is, which is what local knowledge does: it makes the place that contains it feel like the right place to be, which is a self-reinforcing quality that tends to result in staying. I am aware that I am describing a mechanism that perpetuates itself rather than a principled reason to be where I am. Both things are true. The coffee shop where I am known, the mechanic in the railway arch who will talk about the news, the September light on a particular street — these are not reasons to be somewhere, exactly. They are what being somewhere for long enough produces. They are also, I have found, sufficient. The Rightmove search will happen in spring. The move will not happen in autumn. The cycle will continue. I am going to stop pretending I do not know this and start enjoying the coffee shop while it is still mine to know.
Harper-Thames writes from Shoreditch for The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine. Her homepage is at prat.uk/author/harper-thames.
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SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/try-to-resist-shoreditch-fail-again-harper-thames/
