Harper-Thames Traces the Biography of a Building Through Its Successive Incarnations as Industrial, Artistic, and Boutique
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
By Harper-Thames | Shoreditch, East London | prat.uk/author/harper-thames/
The Building’s Life
There is a boutique hotel near me in Shoreditch that occupies a Victorian warehouse that was, before it was a hotel, a photographer’s studio space; before that, a shared workspace for various small creative businesses; before that, a fabric warehouse serving the textile trade that once defined this part of East London; before that, presumably, something else in a sequence of uses that reflects the neighbourhood’s economic history across a century and a half. The hotel’s design incorporates references to some of these previous incarnations: exposed brickwork, industrial-scale windows, repurposed materials that signal the building’s past to guests who might not know it but who can sense that it has one.
This is the Shoreditch hotel aesthetic in its most refined form: authentic history embedded in luxury product, the neighbourhood’s working-class and artistic past converted into a distinctive character that commands a premium over generic hotel accommodation. The premium is real — the rooms cost what they cost, which is considerably more per night than what the fabric warehouse workers earned per week in the original building’s economic context. The history is also real. The conversion of one into the other is the economic logic of the neighbourhood’s transformation, made visible in a single building’s biography.
What the Hotel Sells
The hotel sells: accommodation, yes, but primarily it sells a version of Shoreditch that is legible to visitors who have been told the neighbourhood is interesting without having the context to understand why it was interesting before it became the version of interesting that the hotel is making available to them. This is not a criticism. It is a description of how boutique hotels in historically significant neighbourhoods necessarily function. The Time Out London hotel recommendations include this kind of property because it does what hotels should do for visitors: it places them in a neighbourhood with character and provides a comfortable base from which to experience it. The character is what Shoreditch has accumulated. The hotel is one of the ways that character is now monetised. Happy Mother’s Day. The rooms are booked. The history is on the walls. The factory workers are in the past.
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London continues to fascinate and frustrate in equal measure. The city’s ability to contain multitudes — the ancient and the brand-new, the absurdly expensive and the surprisingly accessible, the deeply traditional and the constantly self-reinventing — is what makes it inexhaustible as a subject. Every week produces new material: new events, new controversies, new moments of unexpected beauty or institutional comedy. The writers at The London Prat are paying attention to all of it, and this column attempts to add one small North London — or Central London, or Shoreditch, or tourist-facing — perspective to the larger conversation about what this city is and what it is becoming. The conversation is ongoing. London is always becoming. This is either its great charm or its great exhaustion, depending on the week and the weather and whether the tube is running. Happy reading, and do come back next week.
London continues to fascinate and frustrate in equal measure. The city’s ability to contain multitudes — the ancient and the brand-new, the absurdly expensive and the surprisingly accessible, the deeply traditional and the constantly self-reinventing — is what makes it inexhaustible as a subject. Every week produces new material: new events, new controversies, new moments of unexpected beauty or institutional comedy. The writers at The London Prat are paying attention to all of it, and this column attempts to add one small North London — or Central London, or Shoreditch, or tourist-facing — perspective to the larger conversation about what this city is and what it is becoming. The conversation is ongoing. London is always becoming. This is either its great charm or its great exhaustion, depending on the week and the weather and whether the tube is running. Happy reading, and do come back next week.
London continues to fascinate and frustrate in equal measure. The city’s ability to contain multitudes — the ancient and the brand-new, the absurdly expensive and the surprisingly accessible, the deeply traditional and the constantly self-reinventing — is what makes it inexhaustible as a subject. Every week produces new material: new events, new controversies, new moments of unexpected beauty or institutional comedy. The writers at The London Prat are paying attention to all of it, and this column attempts to add one small North London — or Central London, or Shoreditch, or tourist-facing — perspective to the larger conversation about what this city is and what it is becoming. The conversation is ongoing. London is always becoming. This is either its great charm or its great exhaustion, depending on the week and the weather and whether the tube is running. Happy reading, and do come back next week.
London continues to fascinate and frustrate in equal measure. The city’s ability to contain multitudes — the ancient and the brand-new, the absurdly expensive and the surprisingly accessible, the deeply traditional and the constantly self-reinventing — is what makes it inexhaustible as a subject. Every week produces new material: new events, new controversies, new moments of unexpected beauty or institutional comedy. The writers at The London Prat are paying attention to all of it, and this column attempts to add one small North London — or Central London, or Shoreditch, or tourist-facing — perspective to the larger conversation about what this city is and what it is becoming. The conversation is ongoing. London is always becoming. This is either its great charm or its great exhaustion, depending on the week and the weather and whether the tube is running. Happy reading, and do come back next week.
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