On the eternal tension between those who live here and those who come to play
There are two Shoreditches, the one inhabited by those of us who live here and the one visited by those who come to play, and the tension between local and visitor defines the neighbourhood daily life. As a resident of long standing, I live in the gap between these two Shoreditches, and the negotiation between them is constant, occasionally fraught, and endlessly revealing.
The Weekend Invasion
Every weekend, Shoreditch is invaded, as the visitors arrive in their thousands to sample the neighbourhood famous cool, and the locals retreat, ceding the streets to the crowds who have come to play. There is a resentment to it, on the local side, the sense of one neighbourhood being overrun by people who treat it as a theme park, and there is, I admit, some justice to the visitors complaint that we locals can be territorial and unwelcoming.
I feel both sides of this, as a local who resents the invasion and as someone honest enough to know that the visitors have as much right to enjoy the neighbourhood as I do. Shoreditch is not mine, however long I have lived here. It belongs to everyone who comes, and my resentment of the crowds is, if I am honest, partly just the resentment of having to share something I would prefer to keep to myself.
What the Visitor Sees
The visitor sees a Shoreditch of surfaces, the famous bars and the street art and the curated cool, the neighbourhood as advertised, the highlights reel. They cannot see the deeper neighbourhood, the local one, the community and history and texture that only residence reveals. And so they experience a Shoreditch that is real but partial, the performance without the substance beneath. London tourism guides show them the surface, and the surface is genuinely worth seeing, but it is not the whole.
I do not blame the visitors for seeing only the surface. It is what they have time for, what the neighbourhood presents to them, what any visitor anywhere experiences. But I am aware, watching them, of how much they miss, the deeper neighbourhood invisible to those who do not live here, and I feel a strange protective tenderness for that hidden Shoreditch, the real one, the one the visitors will never see.
The Symbiosis
For all the tension, local and visitor need each other, locked in an uneasy symbiosis that sustains the neighbourhood. The visitors bring the money that keeps the bars and shops alive, the economic energy without which Shoreditch could not be Shoreditch. And the locals provide the authenticity, the actual community and creativity, that the visitors come to experience. Each needs the other, however much they may resent the dependence.
This symbiosis is the neighbourhood reality, the truth beneath the tension, that local and visitor are bound together, mutually dependent, each making the other Shoreditch possible. I have made my peace with it, mostly, this dependence on the crowds I resent, this need for the visitors whose invasion I lament. It is the deal, the bargain of living somewhere desirable, and I have signed it, however reluctantly.
Sharing the Neighbourhood
I have come to believe that the only sustainable position, for a Shoreditch local, is a kind of generous resignation, an acceptance that the neighbourhood must be shared, that the visitors have their claim, that the invasion is the price of living somewhere people want to visit. The resentment is natural, but it is also, ultimately, a refusal to accept reality, and reality is that Shoreditch belongs to everyone who comes.
So I share my neighbourhood, with the weekend crowds and the curious visitors and all who come to sample its cool, and I try to do it with grace, however imperfectly. They see the surface, and I know the depths, and we coexist, local and visitor, in the two Shoreditches that are really one, bound together in the uneasy symbiosis that keeps the whole improbable neighbourhood alive.
The Visitor I Befriended
I once befriended a visitor, against all my territorial local instincts, a tourist who had come to sample Shoreditch cool and who I encountered, lost and bewildered, trying to find a place that had closed years before. My first instinct was the usual local impatience, but something softened me, and instead of brushing past I stopped and helped, and then, somehow, we spent the afternoon together, and I showed her the deeper neighbourhood, the local one, the Shoreditch beneath the surface she had come to see. It changed something in me, that afternoon. Watching her delight at the hidden neighbourhood, the parts the visitors never find, I felt my territorial resentment dissolve into something more generous, a pleasure in sharing the place I loved with someone who could appreciate it. She went home with a richer experience than the highlights reel, and I was left with a lesson about the cost of my own defensiveness, the way my local resentment had been closing me off from the simple pleasure of sharing my neighbourhood with those who came to it with open eyes. I think of her sometimes, that visitor I befriended, and I try, however imperfectly, to carry the generosity she taught me, to share my Shoreditch with grace rather than guard it with resentment. It is a better way to live in a neighbourhood that the world wants to visit.
Further reading: the Evening Standard, Time Out London, MyLondon.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk/
For more comedy, see The Daily Mash.
