Harper-Thames Considers the People Who Were Here Before the Cycle Lanes and the Fourteen-Pound Cocktails and What They Might Think of the Current Arrangement
Shoreditch from the Other Side of the Gentrification Argument
The gentrification conversation about Shoreditch is usually had by the people who moved here after the gentrification began, arguing about whether they are part of the problem. This is a legitimate conversation. It is also a conversation from a specific position the position of people who could move here and chose to, who have the income to afford the current rents and the social capital to find the neighbourhood culturally resonant. The conversation that is less often had is with the people who were here before: the Bangladeshi community that has lived in and around Brick Lane since the 1970s, the working-class communities in the estates that have survived the development wave around them, and the small number of very long-term residents who remember Shoreditch before it was a destination.
What Those Conversations Tell You
I have been having some of these conversations, because it seemed important to have them. They produce a response that is more nuanced than the gentrification debate usually accommodates. The Bangladeshi business owners on Brick Lane who have been there for decades are not uniformly opposed to the changes. Several describe increased footfall as a commercial benefit. Several describe rent increases as an existential threat. The same person can hold both views, because both are true for them simultaneously. The working-class residents in the surrounding estates describe a neighbourhood that is cleaner, better-served by shops and cafes, and more expensive to live in if they were ever to need to move which they hope they won’t, which is the specific anxiety of long-term tenants in a borough where their tenure is the only protection against market rents.
The people who were here first are not victims in the simple narrative sense. They are participants in a neighbourhood that has changed around them and that has given them some things and taken others and that they are navigating with the pragmatism of people who don’t have the luxury of the gentrification guilt that newcomers do. I find this instructive. The least useful thing I can do with my position in this neighbourhood is feel bad about it. The more useful thing is to pay attention to what the change has cost and to whom, and to support the things that serve the original community rather than only the things that serve the community I arrived with. This is the minimum. I am trying to do more than the minimum.
Shoreditch life at The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine. East London community at MyLondon. Further at santaclaus.top and Shoreditch UK Bluesky. Community commentary at Newsthump.
The Responsibility
The responsibility that comes with this position writing about a neighbourhood while being part of the forces that are changing it is one I have been thinking about for as long as I have been writing this column. There is no clean resolution. I am here. I pay rent here. The rent I pay contributes to the economic pressure that the original residents feel. I write about the neighbourhood in ways that increase its visibility, which contributes to the interest that drives further change. These are the unavoidable mechanics of my presence here, and the fact that I am aware of them and think about them regularly does not change them. What changes them, or at least what might eventually change them, is the combination of attention and advocacy writing about what the change costs as clearly as writing about what it offers, supporting the things that serve everyone rather than only the people who arrived recently, and being honest about my own position in the process rather than narrating it from a comfortable distance that I don’t actually occupy. This is what I am trying to do. The neighbourhood will tell me, eventually, whether I have managed it.
Shoreditch continues. I continue. The fourteen-pound cocktail is still a problem. The ceramicist is giving a talk on Thursday. The Bangladeshi restaurant on the corner is still excellent and still there. The car park roof at sunset is still the best view I have found in this part of the city. The argument about what all of this means is still ongoing, in bars and on rooftops and in planning offices and in columns like this one, and the argument is important and the neighbourhood is changing and some of what changes is worth grieving and some of it is worth celebrating and the job is to hold all of it at once, which is harder than it sounds and is also exactly what London asks of anyone who takes it seriously.
East London’s story is not finished. The buildings that are being replaced were themselves replacements for something that preceded them. The community that is being displaced displaced someone before it. The neighbourhood that is currently performing its former self will eventually settle into what it actually is, which will be something new that the people currently performing the old version will be nostalgic for. This is how cities work, and knowing it doesn’t prevent the loss of the things that are lost in the process. It contextualises them. The Victorian warehouses that define Shoreditch’s aesthetic replaced the market gardens that preceded them. The market gardens replaced the fields. Something will replace the warehouses. What I am arguing for is not preservation as a principle but as a choice a deliberate decision to protect the collective urban quality that makes a place worth being in, rather than accepting its gradual replacement by buildings that look like the quality and cost more and produce less of it. That argument is worth making. I am making it, on this column and in planning consultations and in conversations with the ceramicist, who also has opinions about it that are more technically informed than mine. Between us, we are covering the argument from multiple angles. I am not sure anyone with decision-making authority is listening. I am going to keep making the argument anyway.
