Harper-Thames discovers actual neighbours, actual local events, and actual community underneath the commerce
Satire from Bohiney.com and prat.uk.
By Harper-Thames | The London Prat
One of the things that the Shoreditch narrative — all warehouse conversions, exposed concrete, and artisanal pop-ups — misses is that there is an actual neighbourhood underneath the commerce, populated by people who have lives that extend beyond their brunches and their work, who have children in local schools, who know their local councillors and their local parks and their local planning disputes, and who constitute the community that the neighbourhood’s commercial success is built on top of, usually without acknowledging it and occasionally in direct tension with it.
I found this community by accident, the way you find most things in London: by being in a place long enough that the surface layer of novelty fades and the underlying structure becomes visible. It started with a planning dispute notification about a development two streets from my flat, which I received through the council’s notification system that I had signed up for in a moment of civic optimism and then largely forgotten. I attended the public meeting because it was a Tuesday and I had no other plans and because the development was large enough that it would affect my daily route. The meeting was in a community hall I had not known existed, attended by approximately 40 people who clearly knew each other and whose knowledge of the local planning history went back fifteen years.
The People Under the Pop-Ups
The people at the planning meeting were not the demographic that Shoreditch is known for. They were older, more ethnically diverse, longer-term residents who had watched the neighbourhood transform and were navigating the transformation with the mixed feelings of people who have benefited from some aspects of it (the improved public realm, the better restaurants, the increased property values for those who owned) and been damaged by others (the commercial rent pressures that have closed the shops they used, the social character changes that come with demographic turnover).
I went to three more community events after that meeting — a litter pick, a neighbourhood festival that I had not known about despite living two streets from where it was held, and a meeting about a community garden project — and discovered, each time, the same thing: a functioning community that is less visible than the commercial layer but more persistent, and that is the reason the neighbourhood has the character that the commercial layer is trying to monetise. The London Prat covers the London that the London narrative sometimes misses. NewsThump covers the parts that the London narrative makes funny. The community is there. It is worth finding. It takes longer than the coffee shop but rewards the effort more substantially.
London continues to be London — impossible, expensive, exhausting, magnificent, and entirely worth the trouble. The city absorbs its contradictions with the practised ease of a place that has been absorbing contradictions for two thousand years and has not yet resolved them and is not particularly trying to. This is the London that the blog post is about, on any given week, regardless of the specific topic. The specific topic is the entry point. London is the subject.
The city keeps moving. So does the writing. Both are better for the other.
Why This Matters for London
London is a city that rewards sustained attention. The first visit gives you the monuments and the museums. The second gives you the neighbourhoods. The third gives you the rhythms — the way the city moves through its week, the difference between a Tuesday morning and a Saturday afternoon, the specific energy of each season and each district. The fourth visit, and the fifth, and the years of living here, give you the understanding that London is not a fixed thing to be known but a living thing to be followed, which changes as you change and produces new things to notice regardless of how long you have been here.
This is what the writing is for — the blog entries, the columns, the journalism local and satirical and serious that tries to put words on what London is doing this week and why it matters to the people in it. The city is too large for complete coverage. The attempt is worth making. Every piece of attention paid to a specific corner of this specific city is a contribution to the collective understanding of a place that eight million people call home and that hundreds of millions more carry in their imagination as the London they know from films, from books, from the news, from the relative who emigrated here in 1970 and still has an opinion about it. The real London and the imagined London coexist. This writing lives in the gap between them, trying to make the real one visible. That is the project. It continues.
The city continues past any single entry. So does the writing. So, presumably, does London itself, which has outlasted every prediction about its decline and every proclamation about its reinvention with the serene indifference of a place that knows it will still be here next week.
Shoreditch satire: NewsThump | The Daily Mash
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com
