Harper-Thames has been to most of the bars, some of the clubs, several things that described themselves as immersive experiences, and one event that she still cannot fully explain. Here is what she learned.
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
I want to preface this guide with the acknowledgment that any specific recommendation I make about Shoreditch nightlife is operating on a timeline that bears no relationship to the timeline of publishing. Places open, close, change ownership, change concept, change who goes there, and change back again on a cycle that renders specific venue advice unreliable within approximately six months. What I can offer is more durable: a methodology for navigating the Shoreditch night out landscape that does not depend on specific venues but on principles that apply across the neighbourhood’s particular culture of night-time activity.
The Booking Question
Shoreditch has two categories of evening venue: those that require booking and those that do not. The ones that require booking are, broadly, the ones that have become sufficiently known to have demand in excess of capacity — the restaurant-bars along Rivington Street and the cocktail bars that have accumulated press coverage and social media attention to the point where their waiting lists are part of their brand. The ones that do not require booking are the ones that are either very good and not yet famous, or not very good and therefore available, or good in a way that the booking-culture audience has not yet discovered. The best evenings in Shoreditch tend to be in the last category — the genuinely good place that has not yet been discovered by the booking-culture audience — and the skill is identifying which of the non-booking venues is the undiscovered good one rather than the simply unpopular one.
The methodology: walk around. This sounds obvious and it is not practised enough. Shoreditch at eight o’clock on a weekday evening or at seven on a weekend contains visible information about which venues have crowds that appear to be enjoying themselves as opposed to crowds that appear to be there because their friend booked it. The crowd enjoying itself is usually, though not always, a reliable indicator of a venue that has something genuine to offer. The crowd that appears to be going through the motions of a night out they selected from a list is a different indicator.
The Immersive Experience Problem
A significant portion of Shoreditch’s nightlife economy in recent years has been occupied by what the event industry calls immersive experiences: the locked room escape, the immersive theatre event, the pop-up dining concept where you eat while something is happening around you, the sensory experience that is neither quite a bar nor quite a show nor quite anything else but that costs between forty and ninety pounds per person and lasts between two and three hours. I have been to several of these. I have had a good time at some of them. I have had the specific experience of a significant proportion of them of thinking, approximately forty-five minutes in, that I could be having a better time at a bar for less money and with more freedom of movement.
The immersive experience is a format that works when the specific content is genuinely excellent and when the price is proportionate to the value of that excellence. It is a format that fails when the concept is the product — when what you are paying for is the fact of the experience rather than the quality of what it contains. Shoreditch has both kinds and distinguishing between them in advance is difficult because the marketing language of both is identical. The heuristic I have developed: if the promotional material mentions “Instagram moments” as a selling point, the concept is the product. If it mentions what specifically you will see, do, or eat, the content has a better chance of being worth the price.
What Is Actually Worth Your Time
The Shoreditch evenings I remember most positively have in common: ending up somewhere that I did not plan to go, talking to people I did not know before the evening started, and leaving later than I intended because the conversation or the music or the general quality of the room made leaving feel like the wrong choice. These outcomes are not producible through advance research and booking; they are produced by the kind of open-ended evening that Shoreditch’s density of interesting things — bars, music venues, gallery openings, pop-up events in unusual spaces — makes possible if you approach it with enough flexibility to follow what you find rather than completing the evening you planned. The planning is useful for having somewhere to start. It is not a substitute for being willing to deviate from it. Shoreditch rewards the deviation. Go where the crowd that is enjoying itself is. Stay until you are not. That is the field guide.
The specific thing that Shoreditch does better than most comparable neighbourhoods in London is provide the conditions for the unplanned evening: the density of options within walking distance, the openness to walk-in customers that distinguishes it from the fully-booked destination restaurant areas of the city, and the general atmosphere of an area where being out in the evening is normal enough that the presence of other people in the street provides company and energy rather than threat or indifference. This is an urban quality that is not universal and that is worth naming specifically because it is part of what makes living in Shoreditch different from living in areas with equivalent property prices and fewer evening people on the street. The density of the evening economy is also the density of the evening community, and the two are not separate: the people who work in the bars and the restaurants and the music venues are also the people who are in the neighbourhood in the early morning and the late night and the mid-week afternoon, and their presence contributes to the texture of a place that feels inhabited rather than visited. Shoreditch is simultaneously over-visited and genuinely inhabited, which is a paradox that the neighbourhood has managed better than most comparably popular London areas and that is part of why it remains, despite everything, a place where living is better than not living there.
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/shoreditch-night-out-field-guide-actually-worth-your-time-harper-thames/
