Harper-Thames on the images that capture the current state of E1 and what they reveal
LONDON, UK – Five photographs could tell you almost everything you need to know about Shoreditch in 2025, if you chose them carefully and looked at them carefully. Harper-Thames chose them and looks at them here, for Bohiney Magazine and for The London Prat, which covers Shoreditch with the attention it deserves and sometimes the patience the subject requires.
Photograph One: The Mural Wall on Great Eastern Street
The mural wall on Great Eastern Street is the most photographed single location in Shoreditch, possibly in East London. It has been photographed by tourists, by fashion photographers, by estate agents using it as a background to make a nearby flat seem more interesting, and by the artists whose work appears on it. The current mural is by an artist whose name appears on a plaque at the base, which was not a feature of Shoreditch murals fifteen years ago. The plaque is the tell: it means the work was commissioned or at least officially endorsed, which means it was selected from available options, which means the wall has become a curated surface rather than a free one. The photograph you take here is still striking. The context has changed.
Photograph Two: The Delivery Rider Outside Boxpark
Boxpark on Shoreditch High Street is a pop-up mall made from shipping containers that has been open for over a decade and is therefore the longest-running temporary structure in the neighbourhood. Outside it, at any hour of the day or evening, there are delivery riders waiting for orders to come through. This is the gig economy visible: the riders are not employed by Boxpark, not employed by the restaurants inside it, but are present because of the economic activity it generates. The photograph of the riders outside the containers is the photograph of Shoreditch’s labour economy, which is not the economy that the neighbourhood’s creative brand represents but is the economy that keeps it running at the hours when the brand-economy is closed.
Photograph Three: The Queue at Dishoom
Dishoom on Commercial Street has a queue of between twenty minutes and an hour at every meal time, seven days a week, years after opening. The queue is made up primarily of people who do not live in Shoreditch and who have specifically come to Shoreditch to eat here. The restaurant is excellent. The queue is the measure of destination status: you queue because you have come far enough that the queue is worth it, which means you have committed to the journey, which means the experience is of a different category from the local lunch. The photograph of the queue tells you that Shoreditch is now a place people go to, not only a place people are from or in.
Photograph Four: The Estate Agent Window on Kingsland Road
The estate agent window on Kingsland Road displays properties in Shoreditch and Hoxton at prices that would have been science fiction when the area was being written about as an emerging creative quarter. The photographs of the properties show exposed brick and original features and double-height ceilings that are the visual vocabulary of a specific kind of urban desirability. The prices are the text. The two together tell you what the neighbourhood means to the market, which is a specific kind of meaning and not the only kind but currently the dominant one.
Photograph Five: The Street at Seven AM
At seven in the morning, before the coffee shops have opened and before the tourists have arrived and before the delivery riders have started their first shift, Shoreditch is quiet in the way that all of London is quiet at seven: the city is there, the buildings are there, the street furniture and the murals and the estate agent windows are all there, and the people are not yet, which means the street is for a moment neither a creative quarter nor a brand nor a destination but just a set of streets in East London, which is what it has always been and what it will continue to be when everything else about it has changed again. Harper-Thames photographs it sometimes, at this hour, for reasons that are difficult to articulate but feel important, which is perhaps what photography at its best is for. For more on East London, see The Onion.
Harper-Thames adds a sixth photograph, not taken but imagined: the photograph of herself taking photographs, which is the self-aware gesture of a journalist who covers a neighbourhood that has been covered extensively and who knows that the coverage is itself part of what the neighbourhood has become. This is the condition of Shoreditch journalism in 2025: the street has been described so thoroughly that the description is part of the street, and the photographer is part of the scene, and the only honest response to this condition is to acknowledge it and to keep taking the photographs anyway, because the street continues to produce images that have not been taken yet, at hours that are not crowded yet, in the specific light of a specific morning that will not recur and that is therefore worth recording, even by someone who knows that the recording is also, in some sense, part of the transformation. Harper-Thames photographs Shoreditch. Shoreditch continues. Both of them change. For more on East London, see The Onion.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
