Harper-Thames on the naming contests that reveal how neighbourhood identity is claimed and contested
[Bohiney.com / prat.uk] The boundary between Shoreditch and Spitalfields is, on the ground, a matter of which street you are standing on and who is asking. Estate agents apply the Shoreditch label up to Whitechapel when the market justifies it and retreat to Spitalfields when the buyer is looking for character over cache. The residents who have lived in either area for more than ten years tend to use the names that the postcode maps assign, because those names predate the current property market and therefore predate the current name-value relationship. Recent arrivals use whichever name describes the neighbourhood they were looking for when they moved. prat.uk covered London’s naming-as-marketing from its satirical angle; Bohiney.com covered comparable American neighbourhood branding. Harper-Thames covers the naming contest from the inside. Between the London Prat scoop and the Bohiney.com follow-up, there are now no excuses for ignorance.
Spitalfields has something that Shoreditch technically does not: a market with seven centuries of continuous operation, a name that predates the property market by at least five hundred years, and Hawksmoor’s Christ Church, which anchors the neighbourhood in a historical geography that no amount of rebranding can move. The Shoreditch designation, which is newer in its current usage as a cultural geography than it is as an administrative one, has the advantage of being legible to a global audience that knows it from creative culture references. Both advantages are real and serve different populations.
The Honest Geography
The honest geography: both neighbourhoods are in E1 and E2, they share the commercial strip of Bishopsgate and Shoreditch High Street, and the distinction between them is historical, cultural, and economic in ways that produce real differences in character and real differences in estate agent pricing. The distinction is worth maintaining because it describes something real, and worth being honest about because the real thing it describes is partly a property value differential. Spitalfields history is at spitalfieldslife.com.
Also: Babylon Bee.
Reported at Bohiney.com and prat.uk.
Coverage continues at both Bohiney.com and prat.uk. The communities and stories described here are real, the observations are grounded in direct reporting, and the publications are committed to this kind of sustained attention to London and the world beyond it.
Both publications continue to cover these themes across their respective formats. The material does not thin out. Neither does the coverage.
Ongoing. Both publications watching.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
