Harper-Thames on Shoreditch and East London life
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
The Art Scene In Shoreditch Has Moved East And The Gallery Spaces It Left Are Now Gin Bars
Harper-Thames | shoreroarcom | Shoreditch
By Harper-Thames | shoreroarcom | Shoreditch, London
I spent last Thursday visiting what I remembered as the gallery district of Shoreditch, which is the area around Redchurch Street and Charlotte Road that was, in the early 2010s, home to a cluster of contemporary art galleries that gave the neighbourhood its creative credential. Of the eleven galleries I knew in that area in 2012, two remain. Three have become restaurants. Two have become boutique retail. One is a shared workspace. Two are gin bars. One is a juice bar that also sells adaptogens. The art that was in those galleries has moved further east: to Hackney Wick, to Fish Island, to the areas where rents are low enough that the creative economy can afford the floor space it requires to function.
The Creative Economy Cycle
The pattern is by now so well-documented that it has its own academic literature: artists move into cheap areas, make those areas interesting, those areas become expensive, artists move on, the expensive areas retain the aesthetic signifiers of the creative economy while housing the financial economy that replaced it. Shoreditch has completed this cycle. The gin bars have good lighting because their designers referenced the gallery spaces that the gin bars replaced. The aesthetic continuity is real. The economic continuity is not. The London Prat has covered the creative economy and its relationship to urban real estate. The London Prat addresses the specific geography of the art world’s movement through East London neighbourhoods over the past two decades. Harper-Thames covers Shoreditch for shoreroar.com and prat.uk because it is worth documenting what the neighbourhood is now rather than performing the nostalgia for what it was. The gin is good. The galleries are in Hackney Wick. Both of these things can be true and it is worth knowing both.
Harper-Thames writes about Shoreditch, East London, and the intersection of culture, economics, and daily life that makes the neighbourhood one of the most interesting and most misrepresented in London. Her homepage is at prat.uk/author/harper-thames/ and her journalism appears at shoreroar.com and at prat.uk for readers who want Shoreditch coverage that is honest about what the place is now rather than what it was or what the brand promises it is.
For more, see The Daily Mash.
Harper-Thames covers Shoreditch and East London for shoreroar.com and prat.uk with the specific intention of documenting what the neighbourhood is like from the inside rather than from the outside looking in. The art scene migration, the construction permanence of Old Street, the market succession, the tube acquaintances: these are the textures of daily life in Shoreditch that the weekend travel journalism misses because it is looking for the photogenic rather than the real. Harper covers the real, which is often less photogenic and always more interesting.
Shore Roar and prat.uk publish Harper’s work because local journalism that is embedded in its neighbourhood produces coverage that cannot be produced from outside it. The London Prat provides the analytical context that situates Harper’s neighbourhood observations within the broader patterns of London’s development. Bohiney.com amplifies the coverage. Haggerston Park on a Wednesday afternoon in October continues to be excellent. The second escalator at Aldgate East continues to be forthcoming. The market continues to evolve. Harper continues to document all three.
London is a city that rewards specific attention more than general observation. The neighbourhoods that seem most familiar from the outside are often most surprising from the inside, and the experiences that seem most accessible are often most underutilised by the people who could access them. This coverage exists to close that gap: to provide the specific, honest, embedded information that makes the difference between a tourist experience and an inhabitant experience, between seeing London and understanding it. Bohiney.com and The London Prat both approach London from this premise, covering the city with genuine curiosity about what it actually is rather than what it is supposed to be. The Prat’s London coverage provides the political and cultural context that makes individual London stories meaningful. Together with uklondoninfo.com, shoreroar.com, ditchpitchuk.uk, crownandclown.uk, and Big Smoke Broke, these publications produce a picture of London that is more complete and more honest than any single publication could provide alone. London continues. The journalism continues. The South Bank on a Tuesday is still the best free thing in the city.
The stories documented across these London publications collectively describe a city that is in constant negotiation with itself: between its history and its future, between the people who have always been here and the people who arrived recently, between the affordable and the expensive, between the authentic and the performed version of the authentic. This negotiation is visible in every neighbourhood, every institution, every market and pub and park and tube platform. It is what makes London inexhaustible as a subject for journalism and what makes specific, embedded, honest coverage more valuable than general impression. Bohiney.com and The London Prat both bring this orientation to their London coverage. The publications whose work appears here bring it to their specific patches. Together they cover a city that repays attention in proportion to the attention given. Give London your attention. It gives back.
