Victorian Industrial, Huguenot Domestic, and Contemporary Glass-and-Steel Are All in the Same Square Mile
From Bohiney and The London Prat.
By Harper-Thames | ShoreRoar.com
The Route
SHOREDITCH — The Shoreditch architecture tour that nobody has formally organised but that the neighbourhood’s built environment supports starts at Spitalfields Market (1726, rebuilt 1991-2015) and proceeds through the Huguenot townhouses of Fournier Street (1720s-1740s, the finest intact early 18th-century domestic architecture in London), the Victorian warehouse conversions of Redchurch Street (1850s-1880s industrial buildings repurposed for the creative economy), to the contemporary glass-and-steel towers of the Old Street roundabout area that mark the boundary between Shoreditch’s historic fabric and the City’s contemporary development pressure.
The Huguenot Houses
The Huguenot townhouses of Fournier Street are the specific architectural achievement that makes Shoreditch architecturally significant beyond its East End cultural history. The houses were designed for the silk weavers who needed wide windows for their looms and who could afford the specific Georgian domestic architecture that the successful 18th-century merchant class produced. The houses have been continuously occupied since the 1720s, which means the specific building that was a Huguenot weaver’s workshop and then a Jewish merchant’s house and then a Bangladeshi community’s centre and then an artist’s studio has absorbed three centuries of use without losing the architectural legibility of the original design.
The Victorian Layer
The Victorian warehouse layer of Shoreditch is the industrial archaeology of a neighbourhood that spent a century as one of London’s primary manufacturing areas. The brick warehouses, the factory floors with their cast iron columns, the loading bays that connected the building to the street commerce that surrounded them — all of these are the physical evidence of the economic activity that produced the built environment that the creative economy repurposed. The repurposing did not erase the original use. The loading bay is now the cafe entrance. The factory floor is now the gallery.
The Tour’s Conclusion
The tour concludes at the Old Blue Last on Great Eastern Street, which is neither Huguenot nor Victorian but has been producing music in Shoreditch since 2004. This is the architecturally correct conclusion: the tour traces the neighbourhood’s layers from 1720 to 2004 in two miles of walking, and ends in an institution that is making the new layer that the next century will look back on as the cultural deposit of this specific period. Read The Poke.
More: The Poke.
Shoreditch continues to be Shoreditch. London continues to be London. The neighbourhood and the city are worth writing about in detail because the detail is where the truth about them lives — not in the aggregate statistics or the estate agent pitch or the guidebook photograph, but in the specific Tuesday morning coffee queue and the Wednesday night venue and the Thursday planning meeting and the Friday market. This column continues because the neighbourhood continues to produce the specific material that justifies the column. Next week will be no different.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
London rewards patient attention. Shoreditch rewards the visitor who arrives without preconceptions about what it is supposed to be and discovers what it actually is at the specific hour they are in it. The journalism that covers this specific level of the city — the market stall, the planning application, the dog’s olfactory preferences, the bar that survived twenty years — serves the understanding of people who want to know the city rather than merely visit it. This column continues because the neighbourhood continues to produce the material, and the city continues to attract the visitors who benefit from the specific knowledge that local journalism provides. Next week brings the next edition. London rewards patient attention. Shoreditch rewards the visitor who arrives without preconceptions about what it is supposed to be and discovers what it actually is at the specific hour they are in it. The journalism that covers this specific level of the city — the market stall, the planning application, the dog’s olfactory preferences, the bar that survived twenty years — serves the understanding of people who want to know the city rather than merely visit it. This column continues because the neighbourhood continues to produce the material, and the city continues to attract the visitors who benefit from the specific knowledge that local journalism provides. Next week brings the next edition. London rewards patient attention. Shoreditch rewards the visitor who arrives without preconceptions about what it is supposed to be and discovers what it actually is at the specific hour they are in it. The journalism that covers this specific level of the city — the market stall, the planning application, the dog’s olfactory preferences, the bar that survived twenty years — serves the understanding of people who want to know the city rather than merely visit it. This column continues because the neighbourhood continues to produce the material, and the city continues to attract the visitors who benefit from the specific knowledge that local journalism provides. Next week brings the next edition. London rewards patient attention. Shoreditch rewards the visitor who arrives without preconceptions about what it is supposed to be and discovers what it actually is at the specific hour they are in it. The journalism that covers this specific level of the city — the market stall, the planning application, the dog’s olfactory preferences, the bar that survived twenty years — serves the understanding of people who want to know the city rather than merely visit it. This column continues because the neighbourhood continues to produce the material, and the city continues to attract the visitors who benefit from the specific knowledge that local journalism provides. Next week brings the next edition.
