Before the cocktail menus, a small East End square was the unlikely headquarters of British art’s noisiest generation
Hoxton Square and the Summer the Artists Dressed as Clowns
Hoxton Square on a Friday evening is a pleasant, ordinary sort of place. There is a patch of grass with some large trees, a ring of bars and restaurants, office workers on the benches with cans, and a great many bicycles chained to the railings. Nothing about it suggests that it was once, briefly, the most talked about address in contemporary art. There is no plaque. The gallery has gone. If you want the story you have to know whom to ask, or find someone like me who cannot be stopped from telling it.
The story is how a run-down corner of the East End became, in the 1990s, the playground of the group known as the Young British Artists, and what that did to the neighbourhood afterward.
An Old Square in a Poor District
Hoxton Square was laid out in the 1680s, which makes it one of the oldest squares in London. It was built as a genteel address when Hoxton was a village of gardens and private academies beyond the City. Its gentility did not last. By the nineteenth century the district was industrial and crowded, a centre of the furniture trade and the music hall, with a reputation for poverty and rough manners.
By the 1980s the furniture workshops had mostly closed. The warehouses of Hoxton and Shoreditch stood empty or underused. Rents were among the lowest in inner London, the area was all but dead at night, and landlords were glad of anyone who would take a floor. That, as always, is where artists come in.
The Arrival
The generation that moved in had mostly studied at Goldsmiths College in south London in the late 1980s. They were ambitious, irreverent and good at getting noticed. Lacking galleries that would show them, they put on their own exhibitions in disused industrial buildings. They needed big, cheap studios, and Shoreditch had them. Many came to live and work within a few streets of the square.
In 1993 two of them, Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas, rented a former doctor’s surgery on Bethnal Green Road and ran it for six months as The Shop, selling things they had made: decorated T-shirts, ashtrays, badges, small sculptures. It was part artwork, part business, part party. Almost nothing in it cost much. Pieces from it are now in museum collections.
The Fete
The impresario of the scene was a young man named Joshua Compston. He ran a tiny gallery called Factual Nonsense in Charlotte Road, a few minutes from the square, and he had large ideas about bringing art into the life of the street. In the summer of 1993 he organised an event at the junction of Charlotte Road and Rivington Street and called it A Fete Worse Than Death.
It was a village fete run by artists. There were stalls and games. Damien Hirst and his friend Angus Fairhurst, made up as clowns, sold spin paintings for a pound each, made on the spot by dripping paint on to a whirling card, and would sign them for a small extra consideration. The following year the fete was repeated on a larger scale in Hoxton Square itself, and drew thousands.
Compston died in 1996, at the age of twenty-five. His funeral procession through Shoreditch, with a coffin painted by artists, was among the strangest and saddest sights the district has seen. He is given much of the credit for making Hoxton a destination, and I think rightly.
The Gallery
The establishment arrived in 2000, when the dealer Jay Jopling opened a large branch of his gallery, White Cube, in a converted industrial building on the south side of the square. It showed the leading names of the generation, and its openings filled the square with people holding bottles of beer. For a decade it was a fixture of the international art circuit. A small arts cinema and a cluster of studios and digital firms occupied other corners.
By then the area had become shorthand. The Hoxton haircut and the Shoreditch type were stock jokes. Bars and clubs multiplied. Journalists arrived to describe the phenomenon and estate agents arrived to price it.
The Departure
You will have guessed the rest. The artists had come for cheap space, and their presence made the space expensive. Studios were converted into flats and offices. Painters and sculptors moved east to Hackney Wick, north to Tottenham, and out of London altogether. White Cube closed its Hoxton gallery in 2012, having opened a far larger one south of the river in Bermondsey. The building was put to other uses.
What had been a scene became a setting. The bars kept the look, the exposed brick and bare bulbs, long after the people who had inspired it could no longer afford the rent. The local council, Hackney, has tried through its planning policies to protect affordable workspace for artists and makers, with limited success against the pull of the property market. City Hall has designated creative enterprise zones in parts of east London with the same aim, as the Greater London Authority explains.
Was It Worth It
There are two ways to tell this tale. In one, a band of artists brought life and fame to a neglected district and helped make London a capital of contemporary art. In the other, they were the advance party of gentrification, softening up a working-class neighbourhood for the developers. People who were there tend to believe both, sometimes in the same sentence.
The long-standing residents of Hoxton, many of them in council housing just north of the square, have reason for mixed feelings. Their neighbourhood became famous and its amenities multiplied, but the pubs, cafes and shops they had used closed or changed beyond recognition, and their children could not afford to live nearby. Fame was something that happened around them.
What You Can Still Find
The art has not vanished. There are still galleries in the side streets, though fewer, and several of the survivors are serious. There are studios hidden on upper floors. The square hosts the occasional event. Some of the older buildings around it are listed, as Historic England records, and the proportions of the seventeenth century can still be made out behind the awnings.
Go on a weekday afternoon, when it is quiet. Sit on a bench and consider that on this lawn, one summer, a man who would become among the richest artists in the world stood in a clown costume selling paintings for a pound. If you had bought one you could have sold it since for a great deal of money. Nobody I know did. Everyone I know says they nearly did.
A district that produced so much self-regard was bound to produce comedy, and the English satirical news and British satirical news desks have long feasted on the Shoreditch creative, as has The Daily Mash. The British Onion pages keep the tradition going. The clowns, I should stress, were real. More of my local reporting is on my author page at The London Prat.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk/
