Harper-Thames on the Shoreditch business that graduated from temporary to permanent, what this means for the neighbourhood, and whether permanence is what she hoped for
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
The Six-Year Pop-Up Gets a Permanent Lease: Mixed Feelings, Honestly
Regular readers will know about the ceramics shop that has been operating as a temporary pop-up on a rolling short-term lease near Commercial Street for six years. I have written about it before as an example of the informal economy that Shoreditch has historically been good at sustaining — businesses that exist in the spaces that the formal property market has not yet priced optimally, supported by landlords who prefer some income from an empty space to no income from one that cannot find a long-term tenant at market rent.
The ceramics shop has just signed a five-year lease. The landlord named a price. The ceramics shop owner did the maths and decided that the business was stable enough and that she wanted the security and that the lease was affordable at the current trading levels. I know this because she told me when I went to buy a mug last week and saw the celebration bunting that she had put up in the window and asked about it. She is pleased. I am pleased for her. I am also experiencing the specific ambivalence that I suspect is irrational but that I am going to acknowledge anyway: the pop-up that I wrote about because it was precarious and interesting has become a legitimate business with a lease, which is the correct outcome and which is also somehow less narratively interesting than the precarity was.
What This Reflects
This feeling is a version of a thing I notice about how I write about Shoreditch: I am sometimes more attracted to precarity than its resolution, because precarity is more interesting to write about and resolution is more interesting to live. The ceramics shop has resolved toward the sustainable. This is good. Managing a small business through uncertainty toward the stability that a lease provides is the correct journey; Shoreditch’s commercial character is made of the businesses that survive long enough to become part of it. The shop has a lease. I need more mugs anyway.
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