Harper-Thames Reports on the Local Planning Controversy That Has Produced More Lamppost Notices, Street WhatsApp Group Messages, and Passionate Opinions Than Any Event Since the Bus Route Changed
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
By Harper-Thames | The London Prat
There is a planning application for a building in my street that has produced, in the three months since its submission, more lamppost notices, more WhatsApp group messages among the street’s residents, more passionate opinions expressed at the corner shop, and more genuine civic engagement than anything I have observed in the eighteen months I have lived here. The application is for a mixed-use building: ground floor commercial, five floors of residential above, designed in the contemporary glass-and-brick style that Hackney Council’s design guide describes as “contextually sensitive” and that a significant number of local residents describe in terms I will not reproduce verbatim but that convey strong aesthetic disagreement.
The WhatsApp Group
The street WhatsApp group, which before this planning application was used primarily for reporting suspicious vehicles and sharing photographs of a fox that visits the communal garden, has in the past three months produced 847 messages about the planning application, which I know because I counted them while writing this piece. The messages range from the analytically rigorous (a resident who is a town planner has provided three detailed assessments of the application’s compliance with policy requirements) to the viscerally opposed (a resident who has lived on the street for thirty years and finds the proposed building an affront to the character of the area that she has described in increasingly Homeric terms as the months have passed). Both sets of responses are genuine civic engagement. The town planner’s analysis is more formally useful. The thirty-year resident’s passion is more democratically representative of the street’s feeling. Both are part of the process. Both have been submitted to Hackney’s planning portal. The council will decide.
What I Have Learned About My Neighbours
The planning application has taught me more about my neighbours in three months than the previous fifteen months of living on the same street. I now know who has lived here for thirty years, who has lived here for three, who has a professional opinion about floor-area ratios, who cares primarily about parking, and who has concerns about construction noise that are specifically calibrated to the hours of their infant’s nap schedule. This is useful journalism material. It is also, more importantly, useful neighbourhood material: knowing who your neighbours are, what they care about, and how they engage with collective decisions is the foundation of the kind of community that planners say they want to preserve and that planning applications sometimes threaten. More planning coverage at Bohiney Magazine. More neighbourhood reporting at The London Prat. The decision is expected in August. I will report it.
Shoreditch Then and Now: A Brief History of Cool Running Out of Road
Shoreditch has been “the next big thing” for so many consecutive years that the phrase has lost its predictive content and become simply descriptive: Shoreditch is the area where things happen before they happen elsewhere, and then continue happening after they should have stopped, because the infrastructure of happening — the venues, the galleries, the coffee shops, the estate agents who have learned to say “creative quarter” with a straight face — has become self-perpetuating. The artists who made Shoreditch interesting in the 1990s cannot afford to live in the Shoreditch that their making-interesting created. This is the cycle that every creative quarter goes through, documented in Berlin, Brooklyn, Brixton, and a dozen other contexts, and Shoreditch is no exception to it. The question is what comes after the cycle completes, and the answer in Shoreditch’s case appears to be: more Shoreditch, but more expensive. More from east London at Bohiney Magazine and from The London Prat’s Shoreditch coverage.
More at The Daily Mash and NewsThump.
Why Shoreditch Still Matters
Shoreditch gets written about more than most neighbourhoods and understood less than the volume of writing suggests, because most of the writing is either celebrating it uncritically or critiquing its gentrification in terms that are accurate and not very useful to anyone trying to navigate the actual neighbourhood as it currently exists. What I try to do, covering it week by week at street level, is produce something in between: honest about the contradictions, interested in the specifics, and genuinely fond of the place as it is rather than as it was or as it ought to be. The mural is still there. The rendang is still good. The planning application is still pending. The natural wine still costs eighteen pounds a glass and is worth approximately twelve of those pounds. This is Shoreditch. I live here. More from the neighbourhood at Bohiney Magazine and from The London Prat’s East London coverage, where the reporting is regular, the opinions are grounded, and the coffee references are ongoing. The neighbourhood continues. The coverage continues. Next week there will be more to report, more to observe, more coffee to drink at prices that require a rounding of principles, and more conversations in the street that clarify what London is becoming and what it refuses to stop being. I will be there. Notebook out. Flat white in hand. The mural still being photographed. Every venue that opens, closes, or quietly becomes something other than it advertised occupies space in the neighbourhood’s ongoing negotiation with itself about what it is and what it is for. I cover that negotiation because it matters, and because nobody else is counting the WhatsApp messages or standing in the bagel queue long enough to have the conversation with the person next to them in the queue. That is the job. I will do it again next week.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/shoreditch-planning-application-harper-thames/
