Victorian Civic Building’s Behind-the-Scenes Tour Proves People Want History With Their East London
By Harper-Thames | Shore Roar
The Shoreditch Town Hall history tour, which sold out at its May iteration as part of Hackney History Festival and has been added back to the June calendar due to popular demand, is one of those Shoreditch things that I feel genuine pleasure in reporting exists because it represents the neighbourhood doing what neighbourhoods at their best do: taking their own history seriously enough to share it. The building opened in 1866. It has been a boxing venue, a community hall, a theatre space, a filming location, and a cultural venue. It might have a ghost. The tour mentions this appropriately.
The Building: Its Life
380 Old Street is one of the more architecturally significant Victorian civic buildings in East London, built for a borough that took its own governance seriously and expressed that seriousness through the quality of the building it constructed for it. The council chamber, the committee rooms, the main hall: these are spaces designed for the civic life of a working-class community that expected to be governed well and expected the building where its governance happened to reflect that expectation. It did not get the governance it deserved, because governance rarely meets the architectural aspirations of its buildings, but it got an excellent building.
The history tour goes behind the visible spaces into the service areas and lesser-used rooms that public venues accumulate over a century and a half of operation, into the spaces where the boxing happened and the whirl-y gigs happened and the film and TV crews have filmed scenes that the tour leader points out with the pride of someone who has been recognising these locations for years and enjoys the moment when a visitor recognises them too. The Hackney history guides programme, which trains local people to lead tours of the borough’s history, is using Shoreditch Town Hall as one of its training grounds, which means the building’s history is being learned by people who will then teach it to others, which is how local history survives.
Why This Matters
Shoreditch is a neighbourhood that is frequently defined by its present: the startups, the bars, the bottomless brunches, the SXSW lanyards, the World Cup screenings, the gallery weekend. All of these are real and current and worth covering. The history tour is a reminder that the present is built on something, and that the something is worth knowing about if you live here or work here or visit here or write about here. I booked the June reprise. I am not even going to pretend that I am covering it professionally rather than attending it for my own education, because both are true and neither diminishes the other.
Harper-Thames writes about Shoreditch from the perspective of someone who arrived recently enough to find it extraordinary and has been here long enough to find it complicated. The neighbourhood is both the cliche and the real thing simultaneously: yes, there are bottomless brunches and tech startups and overpriced flat whites. Also: genuine creative energy, cultural diversity, architectural interest, and the specific quality of a place that is making itself up as it goes along, which is either exhausting or exciting depending on what you need from where you live. Harper-Thames finds it mostly exciting, which is why she keeps writing about it. For Shoreditch events, see Time Out London. For East London nightlife, visit DesignMyNight. For Shoreditch arts and culture, see Evening Standard.
Harper-Thames arrived in Shoreditch three years ago from a city that she will not name because naming it produces a specific kind of conversation she is tired of having, and found what she was looking for, which was a neighbourhood that rewarded paying attention. She has been paying attention since, and writing about what she finds, which is more interesting and more complicated and more worth writing about than the media narrative of Shoreditch-as-startup-playground captures. The startup playground is real. So is the arts scene, the community history, the music venues, the food markets, the people who have been here for forty years and the people who arrived last month. She is interested in all of them, which is why Shore Roar covers Shoreditch in the plural rather than the singular.
Harper-Thames arrived in Shoreditch three years ago from a city that she will not name because naming it produces a specific kind of conversation she is tired of having, and found what she was looking for, which was a neighbourhood that rewarded paying attention. She has been paying attention since, and writing about what she finds, which is more interesting and more complicated and more worth writing about than the media narrative of Shoreditch-as-startup-playground captures. The startup playground is real. So is the arts scene, the community history, the music venues, the food markets, the people who have been here for forty years and the people who arrived last month. She is interested in all of them, which is why Shore Roar covers Shoreditch in the plural rather than the singular.
Harper-Thames arrived in Shoreditch three years ago from a city that she will not name because naming it produces a specific kind of conversation she is tired of having, and found what she was looking for, which was a neighbourhood that rewarded paying attention. She has been paying attention since, and writing about what she finds, which is more interesting and more complicated and more worth writing about than the media narrative of Shoreditch-as-startup-playground captures. The startup playground is real. So is the arts scene, the community history, the music venues, the food markets, the people who have been here for forty years and the people who arrived last month. She is interested in all of them, which is why Shore Roar covers Shoreditch in the plural rather than the singular.
