Harper-Thames on the wellness industry’s colonisation of East London’s railway arches and what the yoga demographic says about who Shoreditch is for now
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
Eleven Yoga Studios: The Wellness Industry’s Claim on Shoreditch
I counted eleven yoga studios within what I would call walking distance of my flat in Shoreditch, which is approximately a fifteen-minute walk in any direction. Eleven is a large number of yoga studios for a neighbourhood of this size. I have been to three of them: one that is in a railway arch and is excellent in the specific way that high-quality yoga instruction in an unexpectedly beautiful industrial space is excellent; one that is in a converted ground floor of a building that also contains a coffee roastery and a design studio, which is a Shoreditch combination of functions; and one that I went to once on a recommendation and that I found to be charging significantly more than the quality of the instruction justified and which I have not returned to.
The eleven yoga studios represent the wellness economy’s claim on the railway arches and ground-floor commercial spaces that used to contain different things — manufacturing, storage, the kinds of small businesses that the current rental market has priced out. The wellness economy can pay the rents that the manufacturing economy cannot. The yoga students who attend the studios can afford the class prices that the railway arch rental costs require. This is a straightforward account of how the market allocates space.
What the Market’s Allocation Means
What it means socially is that the neighbourhood’s commercial ground floor increasingly serves the specific demographic that can afford eleven nearby yoga studios, which is not the demographic that lived in Shoreditch before the current rental level made the demographic that lives here now the one that lives here now. This is the gentrification observation that I keep making in different registers. Managing urban commercial space through the market produces the allocation that the market produces; Shoreditch’s commercial character is shaped by who can afford to be there. I go to the railway arch studio on Wednesdays. It is genuinely excellent. The neighbourhood’s complexity remains.
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