Harper-Thames Rides the Night Bus From Waterloo to Hackney Road and Reports Back on What London Looks Like When Nobody Is Performing
The best journalism I have ever done has been from the top deck of a night bus. Not published journalism — the kind that sits in notebooks and becomes the foundation layer of understanding a place that eventually surfaces in something that gets printed. The night bus removes the performance from London. Nobody on the N26 at two in the morning is presenting themselves for evaluation by the city. They are getting home, or going somewhere they have decided to go with the clarity of commitment that late hours produce in people who are past the point of weighing options.
I rode the night bus from Waterloo to Hackney Road last Friday in both directions, arriving in Shoreditch at half past one and returning at four, which gave me two and a half hours of the neighbourhood in the specific state that defines it more honestly than any Saturday afternoon visit could. Shoreditch at two in the morning is three different places simultaneously. The first is the hospitality district — the bars on Curtain Road, the clubs off Bethnal Green Road — processing its customers toward the end of the night in the specific way that venues process customers toward the end of the night: the outdoor smokers, the queue for late food, the negotiations between groups about what happens next in a city that closes earlier than it claims to.
The Second Shoreditch
The second Shoreditch at two in the morning is the service economy that makes the first one function: the delivery riders on Lime Street corner, the cleaning staff arriving at the offices on Old Street, the kitchen porters from the restaurants whose last covers finished an hour ago and whose commute home runs on different schedules than the people they served. These are the people I talk to on the top deck of the N26, and their relationship to Shoreditch — the neighbourhood, not the destination — is more complex and more interesting than the relationship of the people spending money in the bars below.
The third Shoreditch at two in the morning is quieter: the residential streets off Hoxton Square, the council estates that predate the bars by forty years, the people walking dogs and cycling home who live here rather than visiting here and for whom the Saturday night economy of Shoreditch is a backdrop to ordinary life. More from me at Harper-Thames. Also Londonist.
SOURCE: http://prat.UK
