On the particular quality of East London in the hour between six and seven, when the neighbourhood is briefly between its identities
Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat — Harper-Thames on Shoreditch after dark.
There is an hour in Shoreditch, roughly between six and seven on weekday evenings, when the neighbourhood is between its daytime and nighttime identities and has not yet decided what it is. The office workers are gone. The night crowd has not arrived. The streets have the particular quality of transitional spaces: emptier than they should be, more legible than usual, the underlying architecture visible through the gaps where the crowd normally stands. I walk through it several times a week and I have come to think of it as the neighbourhood at rest, which it is not precisely, but it has that quality of a breath between sentences.
The Architecture You Can See
Shoreditch reveals its bones in this hour. The Victorian warehouses and railway arches and Georgian terraces that form the substrate of the neighbourhood are most visible when the street-level activity that normally obscures them quiets down. The buildings are, in many cases, extraordinary: structures built for purposes that no longer exist, adapted with varying degrees of care and success for purposes their builders could not have imagined. The old factory that is now a coffee shop, the railway arch that is now a gym, the Georgian townhouse that is now a creative agency — each one is a palimpsest, the original use present in the bones and the current use layered over it.
The Between-Crowd
The people in the street during this hour are the between-crowd: the delivery cyclists, the dog walkers, the residents who have always been there and who have the neighbourhood to themselves for sixty minutes before the evening economy reclaims it. They move with the ease of people who know where they are going and have no competition for the pavement. I recognise some of them from the same hour the previous week and the week before that, which tells you that the between-crowd is regular, that the same people inhabit the transitional Shoreditch as a matter of routine, drawn there by the particular quality of the quiet.
The Bars Coming to Life
By seven the transition is underway. The bars begin to fill from the back, the way bars always fill: the regulars arrive first, then the people who work nearby, then the groups that have planned to meet here, then the groups that have not planned but find themselves here anyway. The noise level rises in increments that are individually imperceptible and collectively dramatic. By eight the Shoreditch I walked through at half past six is entirely gone, replaced by the Shoreditch that will be here until two, which is a different neighbourhood with different rules and different people and a completely different relationship to the concept of a reasonable volume.
Why I Keep Walking It
The walk between six and seven is the walk I find most useful for understanding the neighbourhood, because the neighbourhood in that hour is not performing for anyone. It is between performances, between the workday self and the evening self, between the identity it markets to outsiders and the one it keeps for itself. This is when you see what a place actually is, rather than what it presents, and what Shoreditch actually is — complicated, layered, in constant negotiation between its past and its present — is something I find worth seeing on a regular basis.
For more from Harper-Thames on Shoreditch, visit Harper-Thames. More on East London at The Guardian.
There is a further quality to that transitional hour that I have been trying to name for a while, which is the quality of permission. During business hours, Shoreditch is organised around purpose: everyone has somewhere to be, something to do, a reason to be moving in a specific direction. After the offices empty and before the bars fill, that organisation dissolves. The street belongs, briefly, to whoever happens to be on it for whatever reason, including no reason, including the reason of simply wanting to be somewhere between the day and the evening without committing to either. I find this permission valuable in a way that is difficult to justify rationally but easy to justify experientially: I go home from these walks in a better state than I left. The evidence is clear even if the mechanism is not.
I should add that the transitional hour on weekends is entirely different, because the weekday structure that produces the gap does not exist. On a Saturday evening, Shoreditch transitions from daytime to nighttime over a longer, slower arc, and the specific quality of the weekday between-time is not available. This makes it a weekday thing, specifically, which means making a habit of it requires a life that includes some weekday flexibility, which I acknowledge is not universal. If you have it, use it for this. The city at rest is worth the small effort of being there when it rests.
The between-time is also the time when the light in Shoreditch is best — the angle of the evening sun on the Victorian brickwork produces a warmth the midday light does not. It lasts about twenty minutes and it is worth being outside for it.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk/
