Harper-Thames on the transformation of E2’s most photographed strip and whether the story ended well
LONDON, UK – Redchurch Street in Shoreditch is the street that property developers and retail consultants cite when they want to illustrate how a formerly industrial side street can become a destination luxury retail strip. Harper-Thames covers Shoreditch for Bohiney Magazine and for The London Prat, and has been thinking about the Redchurch Street story and whether the conventional narrative about it is accurate.
The Narrative
The conventional narrative: Redchurch Street was unremarkable industrial and commercial E2 until the late 2000s, when a cluster of independent design-led shops opened, attracting press coverage and footfall that raised the street’s profile, which attracted further retail investment, which raised rents, which displaced the independent shops, which were replaced by global brands and hospitality operators who wanted the association with the street’s acquired identity. The narrative is broadly accurate and is also incomplete.
The independent shops that gave Redchurch Street its initial identity were not naive victims of a process they did not understand. Several of their founders were consciously building a destination and were aware that building a destination raises values and that rising values displace the people who built the destination. Some sold their businesses at the peak of the valuation cycle. Some were displaced by rent increases they could not have absorbed even with foresight. A few remain, operating in a street that is both more valuable and less interesting than it was when they arrived.
What It Is Now
Redchurch Street now contains a mix: global brands and hospitality operators who came in the second wave, a handful of independent survivors, and the Shoreditch House hotel which is the street’s largest and most visible occupant and which has thoroughly absorbed the street’s identity into its own brand narrative. The street is photogenic, is well-served by coffee, and has the specific aesthetic coherence of a place that has been curated by market forces rather than planning: expensive but not boring, polished but not anonymous.
Whether this is better or worse than what it was is a question that answers differently depending on whether you are a resident, a visitor, a trader, or a property owner. The resident’s answer is that the street is less useful and more crowded. The visitor’s answer is that the street is exactly what they came to Shoreditch for. The trader’s answer depends entirely on when they arrived and what their lease terms are. The property owner’s answer is that it worked. The Tower Hamlets planning record documents the permissions that shaped it.
The Broader Lesson
The Redchurch Street story is instructive not because it is unusual but because it is typical. The sequence of creative clustering, destination formation, value increase, and displacement is the standard trajectory of urban neighbourhood transformation in the 21st century, and every city that has experienced it has produced versions of the same debate about whether anything could or should have been done differently. The debate in Shoreditch is not finished and will not be finished. The street continues. Harper-Thames will continue to report from it, and from the streets around it, and from the conversation between what these streets were and what they are becoming, which is the conversation that makes East London worth covering. For more on retail and identity, see Private Eye.
The Redchurch Street story ends, for now, in the state of settled transformation: the street is what it is, the development trajectory is visible if not complete, and the people who were here for the early phase have either moved on or adapted or, in a few cases, remained and found that the neighbourhood’s new identity is not incompatible with their own, just differently inflected. Harper-Thames covers this street as part of covering Shoreditch broadly, and finds the street in its current state interesting in the way that all contested spaces are interesting: it is still becoming something, the becoming is not finished, and the people on the street are still making decisions about what it should be, even if those decisions are increasingly made through the proxy of lease terms and planning applications rather than through the more immediate agency of choosing to open something new. For more on retail and identity, see Private Eye.
The Lesson for Other Streets
The Redchurch Street story is studied by urban economists and retail consultants because it is relatively well-documented and relatively well-understood. The lesson they draw from it is usually about the value of creative clustering as a commercial catalyst, which is accurate but incomplete. The more complete lesson is that creative clustering produces value that is captured by those who own property in the cluster rather than by those who created the creative activity, and that this mis-alignment of value creation and value capture is the engine of displacement that makes creative quarters temporary rather than permanent. Whether this can be changed requires either policy intervention to capture some of the value for the public benefit, or changes in property ownership models that give the creative workers a stake in the value they generate. Both solutions exist in theory. Neither has been implemented at the scale required. The street continues. The lesson is available for whoever wants to learn it.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
