Walking the road that connects Old Street to Shoreditch High Street documents a postcode in its current configuration
Satire from Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
Satire from Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
Harper-Thames writes from Shoreditch on the Great Eastern Street corridor and what it reveals.
The Road and Its Uses
Great Eastern Street, which runs from Old Street roundabout to Shoreditch High Street station, is approximately 800 metres of the specific configuration that Shoreditch has settled into: luxury hotel, startup office, independent coffee shop, luxury hotel, co-working space, vacant unit, boutique restaurant, startup office, community space that is trying to remain a community space. Walking it at different times of day produces different readings of the same road. At 7am it is almost entirely delivery drivers and hospitality workers. At noon it is tech workers eating lunch and tourists taking photographs. At midnight it is people going to or coming from the bars that make Great Eastern Street a destination after dark.
The citizenM Hotel and Its Meaning
The citizenM hotel on Great Eastern Street, which the Twisted Wonderland column noted was built in 2016 on a site that previously hosted street art in a car park, is the physical embodiment of the Shoreditch gentrification narrative in a single building: it is stylish, relatively affordable for a hotel, explicitly pitched at the creative and tech traveller, decorated with commissioned art, and occupying the space where the spontaneous art that made the area interesting once was. It is also a very good hotel. Both of these things are true simultaneously, which is the specific condition that makes Shoreditch difficult to have a simple opinion about.
Village Underground and the Counter-Argument
Village Underground, also on Great Eastern Street, is the counter-argument to the narrative that the neighbourhood is entirely given over to the commercial co-optation of creativity. The tube carriages on the viaduct are still there. The below-market studios are still there. The programming continues. The counter-argument is smaller and more expensive to maintain than the narrative it counters, but it is there, and its continued presence is the evidence that the outcome is not inevitable. The Village Underground continues providing it. The Time Out East London continues documenting the corridor from the cultural perspective. Both confirm that the street contains more than one story.
Shoreditch generates the material and Harper-Thames generates the column. The two have been in productive dialogue for long enough that the column has developed the specific insider knowledge that only sustained presence in a neighbourhood produces: the knowledge of what is new, what is changing, what was here before the new thing arrived, and what the arrival of the new thing means for the neighbourhood that the new thing has joined. That knowledge is what this column offers each week: the Shoreditch perspective from the inside, written with the affection and the scepticism that the neighbourhood earns from people who have watched it transform across multiple iterations. The Harper-Thames column at The London Prat continues. Shoreditch continues. The dialogue between the two continues. The column returns next week with the same neighbourhood in its next specific iteration.
The neighbourhood continues. The column continues with it. London keeps providing what Shoreditch columnists need, which is Shoreditch in continuous transformation, and Shoreditch keeps providing what London needs, which is the reminder that cities are made by the people who inhabit them and unmade by the markets that price those people out. Both truths are in the postcode. The column documents both. It returns next week.
The column exists because the city deserves it. London is the city that attracts more visitors per year than any other European city and that provides more to see and experience than any visitor can process in a single trip, which means that every visitor leaves with things undone and places unvisited and food uneaten and a reason to return. The column tries to give every visit the best chance of including the things that make London the city that people return to, which is the city beneath the tourist surface: the neighbourhoods that reward the visitor who ventures away from the prescribed circuit, the markets that are better on a Tuesday than on a Saturday, the museum rooms that the crowds do not find, and the specific London pleasures that require a bit of knowledge to locate and a bit of time to appreciate. That knowledge is what this column offers. The column returns next week with more of it.
Shoreditch keeps producing the neighbourhood stories. London keeps producing the visitor stories. The columns keep producing both. The subjects are inexhaustible. The column is weekly. The weekly column and the inexhaustible subjects have been in productive dialogue for long enough that the column has developed the specific local knowledge that sustained attention to a specific place produces. That knowledge compounds. The column continues. London continues. Both return next week. The column continues. The city continues. Both return next week with the same commitment to the specific and the observed. The column continues. The city continues. Both return next week with the same commitment to the specific and the observed. The column continues. The city continues. Both return next week with the same commitment to the specific and the observed.
More at https://waterfordwhispersnews.com.
SOURCE: Satirical Journalism
