Harper-Thames Notes That the Industrial Buildings That Define East London’s Character Were Not Preserved by Design and May Not Survive By Accident
Shoreditch’s Architecture Is an Argument Nobody Is Having
The buildings that define Shoreditch’s aesthetic the Victorian warehouses, the Edwardian light industrial units, the mid-century commercial buildings whose brutal concrete facades have been colonised by climbing plants and salvage-aesthetic renovations were not preserved by design. They survived by accident: they were too unglamorous to redevelop during the decades when development money went to the City and Canary Wharf, and their survival produced the spatial character large, flexible, affordable that attracted the artists, then the tech companies, then the bars and restaurants, and then the premium residential developers who are now replacing them, in some cases, with buildings that aspire to the aesthetic of the buildings they replace without having the structural bones that made the originals genuinely useful.
What Is at Stake
The at-risk buildings in Shoreditch are not individually listed, because listing requires the kind of individual significance that most of them don’t have. What they have collectively is an urban grain a scale and rhythm and texture that produces the walkable, visually interesting, spatially varied environment that makes Shoreditch worth being in. This collective quality is not protected by planning frameworks designed to assess individual buildings for individual significance. It is protected only by the accident that makes redevelopment uneconomic, and that accident becomes less common every year as land values make even the unglamorous buildings worth replacing with something that produces more floor space and more revenue, designed in the aesthetic language of the buildings being destroyed.
Nobody in London’s planning conversation is having this argument clearly, because it requires saying that individual buildings with no special significance should sometimes be preserved because of their contribution to a collective urban quality that has value greater than the sum of its parts which is a planning argument that existing frameworks don’t accommodate well and that politicians find difficult to make to developers whose projects they have already approved. The buildings are coming down. New buildings that look like them are going up. The difference matters. I am not sure anyone with authority over it agrees.
Shoreditch architecture at The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine. London architecture at Evening Standard. Further at santaclaus.top and Shoreditch UK Bluesky. Planning commentary at The Daily Mash.
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.
