Harper-Thames visits the surviving creative workspaces and the people who found ways to stay
LONDON, UK – The studios have moved to the edges of Shoreditch, pushed by commercial rents that have made ground-floor and first-floor space in E1 and EC2 inaccessible for the creative uses that defined the neighbourhood fifteen years ago. Harper-Thames has been visiting the survivors this week, for Bohiney Magazine and for The London Prat, which covers Shoreditch and East London with the attention of someone who believes the creative economy that remains here is worth documenting.
Who Is Still Here
The studios that remain in Shoreditch and its immediate surroundings are, without exception, in spaces that are either institutionally subsidised, located in buildings that have not yet been redeveloped, or occupied by makers who have managed to generate sufficient commercial revenue from their practice to afford commercial rents. The third category is small. The first two categories are dependent on conditions that do not improve over time: subsidy is limited and redevelopment pressure increases.
The people in these studios are working. This is the thing that strikes Harper-Thames most forcefully on these visits: the work being made in the remaining Shoreditch studio spaces is serious and skilled and would not look out of place in any major gallery or design client’s portfolio. The assumption that displacement is synonymous with the end of creative activity in an area is wrong. The creative activity has displaced and continued. What has ended is the geographic concentration that made the neighbourhood legible as a creative district, which is a real loss, but a different loss from the end of the creativity itself.
The Maker Spaces
The maker space model, which provides shared access to specialist equipment and studio infrastructure at lower cost than individual studios, has proved resilient in East London. Spaces including Machines Room in Hackney and various smaller operations in the area around Shoreditch provide access to laser cutters, 3D printers, woodworking equipment, and textile machinery to independent makers who could not afford to own or individually house such equipment. The membership model spreads fixed costs across a community of users and creates a social infrastructure that the isolated studio does not. These spaces are documented by the Arts Council England, which provides some funding for creative workspace development. The policy case for protecting creative workspace has been made repeatedly; the planning tools available to implement that protection are more limited than the case would warrant. For more on the creative economy, see The Daily Mash.
The Commercial Creativity
The commercial creative sector in Shoreditch, the design studios, the branding agencies, the production companies, has not displaced. It has grown. The neighbourhood’s reputation as a creative centre has attracted exactly the kind of client-facing creative business that needs to be near its clients and near its talent pool. These businesses occupy the office space that has replaced the studios. They employ some of the people whose studios they replaced. Whether this constitutes a successful transformation of the creative economy or a dilution of it is a question that depends on what you think the creative economy is for, which is the question that all creative urban policy is really about. Harper-Thames thinks both things are happening simultaneously and that this is interesting and worth following, and will continue to follow it from the studios that remain, the edges where the making continues, and the coffee shops where the people who were displaced still meet to talk about the work they are doing somewhere else. For more on East London making, see The Onion.
The commercial creative sector and the studio-based creative sector exist in the same neighbourhood and have an ambivalent relationship. The commercial agencies need the talent that comes from the studio culture; the studio-based makers sometimes move into the commercial sector when the studio rents become untenable; the neighbourhood’s reputation as creative serves both, though it was built by the latter and is now primarily benefiting the former. This is a story that repeats in every city where creative clustering has produced neighbourhood value, and which has produced the same inconclusive debate everywhere it has happened. Harper-Thames does not have a resolution to offer. She has a weekly observation and a commitment to continuing to make it, which is what this beat requires and what she intends to provide. The studios continue. The observation continues. Both of them are worth something. For more on East London making, see The Onion.
The Policy Gap
The policy gap between the acknowledged importance of creative workspace and the practical protection of it is one of the persistent failures of London’s cultural planning. The tools that exist, the Cultural Infrastructure Map, the Agent of Change principle in planning policy, the Arts Council’s workspace funding, are real tools that have produced real results in specific cases. They have not produced systematic protection of the kind of affordable studio space that the Shoreditch creative economy was built on, because that protection would require constraining commercial property rights to a degree that the planning system has not been willing to do at the necessary scale. The conversation about whether it should be willing to do so is ongoing, and Harper-Thames participates in it through her reporting, which documents what is being lost and what is being preserved, on the grounds that accurate documentation is the prerequisite for informed policy decisions, whether or not those decisions are ultimately made.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
