Harper-Thames Charts the Multi-Stage Transformation of a Square That Has Been Interesting for Different Reasons in Each Decade
Written by Harper-Thames for Bohiney Magazine, republished by The London Prat. Harper-Thames writes about Shoreditch from a different angle than Cyndi Himmelstiere and they have agreed to disagree about the coffee.
Hoxton Square, which is adjacent to Shoreditch and shares its cultural orbit, has been through at least three distinct phases of gentrification since the early 1990s: the first phase, which turned it from a neglected industrial area into an artist’s enclave; the second phase, which turned the artist’s enclave into a destination for the kind of people who like to be near artist’s enclaves without being artists; and the third phase, which is current and which appears to be turning it into the kind of place that the people in the second phase have aged into, which is to say expensive, comfortable, and vaguely nostalgic for what it used to be, which includes the phase they were responsible for creating.
Harper-Thames has a specific relationship with Hoxton Square that goes back to visiting it as a younger journalist when it was still in the second phase and seemed like the most interesting square in London, because all the interesting people appeared to be there simultaneously, in bars that had not yet become expensive and galleries that had not yet become offices. The second phase Hoxton Square was where you went if you wanted to see what London was doing culturally before the rest of London knew it was doing it. The third phase Hoxton Square is where you go if you want to have an excellent lunch at a restaurant that knows what it is doing and charges accordingly, which is not nothing but is different from what it was.
The Square and Its History
Hoxton Square’s history before the gentrification is as interesting as its history during it: the square was built in the 1680s as a fashionable residential address outside the City of London, declined through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as the wealthy moved west and the square became an industrial and working-class area, and spent approximately a century as the kind of place that Victorian social reformers wrote about and that Victorian residents of the area would not have recognised as the fashionable address its original design suggested. The gentrification of the 1990s was therefore not the first time Hoxton Square had changed its social character. It was the latest in a series of transformations that have been occurring since the square was built. The current third phase is the next chapter in a story that is three hundred years old and that will presumably continue past the third phase into a fourth that we cannot currently predict.
What the Third Phase Looks Like
The third phase of Hoxton Square is characterised by: restaurants that are excellent and not cheap, residents who have been in the area since the second phase and who now have mortgages, offices of companies that are creative in a way that can be described in a funding pitch, and a specific ambient tone of settled creative professionalism that is very comfortable and slightly less interesting than the second phase, because the second phase was uncertain and interesting in the way that uncertain places are interesting, and the third phase is certain and comfortable in the way that certain places are less so. Harper-Thames finds this trajectory depressing in the specific way that journalists who cover gentrification find all gentrification depressing: it is the story they need to keep telling and the outcome they cannot prevent. According to London the Inside, Hoxton Square is one of Inner London’s most photographed green spaces. NewsThump covers gentrification phases with accurate characterisation of each.
What the Fourth Phase Will Look Like
If Hoxton Square follows the pattern that Harper-Thames has observed in other East London locations that have gone through multiple gentrification cycles, the fourth phase will involve a partial return of the creative uses that the third phase made expensive, not because the economics have changed but because enough time has passed that the creative community finds the existing character interesting rather than threatening. This is the specific London neighbourhood cycle where regeneration eventually attracts the people who attracted the regeneration, on the grounds that the regenerated version of the area has the infrastructure the original version lacked. The third phase people will stay. The fourth phase people will arrive. The square will become more crowded and more interesting and more expensive in a sequence that is entirely predictable and unstoppable. Harper-Thames notes this not to be cynical but to be accurate. Hoxton Square is a good square. It has been a good square through three phases. It will be a good square through a fourth.
The third phase of Hoxton Square also has a positive dimension that Harper-Thames wants to be fair about: the restaurants that characterise it are genuinely good, the public space of the square itself is better maintained than it was in the second phase when the council maintenance budget was lower, and the residents who have been there since the second phase have produced a stable community with institutional memory of what the square was and what it has been through. This gives the third phase a depth that pure new-arrival neighbourhoods do not have. The depth is the accumulated history of successive populations finding Hoxton Square worth being in, which is the longest argument available for why a place is genuinely good rather than just fashionable. Hoxton Square has been genuinely good for three decades in different ways in each decade. The fourth phase will add to this record.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
