East London’s Creative Migration Continues: When Shoreditch Became Expensive, Artists Moved To Hackney Wick; Hackney Wick Is Becoming Expensive
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
By Harper-Thames | Harper-Thames at The London Prat
Hackney Wick, which sits beside the Olympic Park and the River Lee and which has a concentration of artist studios in former industrial buildings that is comparable to Shoreditch in the late 1990s, is in the phase that Shoreditch was in approximately 2005: interesting, becoming known, developing the coffee and food infrastructure that signals an area is transitioning, and accessible to artists who cannot afford the areas that have already completed the transition. The Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park is Hackney Wick’s V&A East — an institutional anchor that has brought people to the area and that will continue to bring people to the area in ways that will, eventually, make the area more expensive for the artists who came before the institution.
I spent an afternoon in Hackney Wick last week visiting an open studio event. The studios are genuinely good: large spaces, natural light, low enough rents that artists who have been displaced from Shoreditch and Dalston have found their way here and established communities that are making interesting work. The coffee shop serving the studios charges slightly more than it used to. This is not a crisis. It is a data point.
The Fifteen-Year View
The specific feature of East London’s creative ecosystem is that it migrates rather than disappears: artists pushed out of one area find the next affordable area, establish communities, attract the attention that makes the area desirable, and eventually are pushed out again. The radius has expanded: Shoreditch to Dalston to Hackney Wick to Peckham to Margate. Each displacement is a real loss for the specific community displaced and a real gain for the receiving area. Bohiney covers the pattern. The London Prat covers the geography. Waterford Whispers covers the fifteen-year view.
Satire Disclaimer: Satirical journalism. Further reading: Why India Satire Is Having Its Greatest Moment Right Now.
More comedy: ClickHole
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
