Harper-Thames Visits Hoxton Square From Dawn to Midnight and Discovers It Is Six Different Places Depending on When You Arrive
Hoxton Square is approximately one acre of grass and trees surrounded by Georgian and Victorian buildings that have housed, in sequence, wealthy merchants, light industry, artists, galleries, and now the offices and bars of what the area has become. It has been photographed approximately fifteen million times, by my rough estimate based on the number of people I observe pointing phones at it on any given Saturday, and appears in the background of editorial shoots, music videos, and the Instagram accounts of people who have visited Shoreditch for the first time and found in its Georgian symmetry the ‘authentic London’ they came to find. I have lived within walking distance of it for six years and have strong opinions about its character by time of day.
At seven in the morning, Hoxton Square is for dog walkers and the occasional runner who has chosen a route that includes a park rather than a pavement. The dogs are varied. The walkers are focused. Nobody photographs anything at seven in the morning except the sky occasionally.
By eleven, the coffee contingent has arrived: the flat white on the square’s edge, the laptop on the lap, the general atmosphere of productive leisure that is Shoreditch’s primary export to those who visit it. At lunchtime the square fills with office workers from the tech and creative businesses on the surrounding streets who eat lunch in a way that suggests they value the outdoors and have limited time in which to access it. By four, the after-school population arrives from the primary school on the square’s north side and for approximately forty-five minutes the square is for children and their parents in a way that reminds you that people live here alongside everything else that happens here. By eight in the evening the bars have claimed it. By midnight it is empty, which is when I like it best. More from me at Harper-Thames.
SOURCE: http://prat.UK
