Harper-Thames on the market traders, the railway arch mechanics, the vinyl dealers, and the specific quality of a place where interesting things happen because nobody has decided to curate them yet
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
I want to tell you about Shoreditch before it was Shoreditch in the way that people mean when they say Shoreditch, which is to say before it was a destination, a brand, a thing that appears on lists of places to go and things to eat and art to see in a city that has been producing those lists with increasing confidence since approximately 2008. I want to tell you about it not because I am committed to the idea that the past was better — it was better in some ways and worse in others, like all pasts — but because the specific quality of a place before it knows it is interesting is a quality worth understanding, partly for its own sake and partly because it is the quality that produces the things that later make it interesting, and understanding it might help with the question of where the next version of it is now.
The Mechanics and the Market Traders
Before the railway arches under Shoreditch High Street became cocktail bars and contemporary art spaces and artisanal coffee roasters, they were mechanics’ workshops, panel beaters, tyre fitters, and the kind of businesses that work with their hands on things that other things depend on functioning correctly. These businesses were in the arches because the arches were affordable and practical: good ceiling height, large openings for vehicle access, structural solidity, proximity to roads where the customers were. They were not there because the arches had character, though the arches had character. They were there because the economics worked.
The mechanics have mostly gone now, displaced by the same economics that brought the cocktail bars: rising rents reflecting the rising desirability of the arches’ character, which the cocktail bars are prepared to pay for in a way that the mechanics were not. Some of them are still operating on the edges of the postcode, in the arches further from Old Street station where the premium for character is lower. They are still fixing cars. The cars are slightly different cars from the ones they used to fix — newer, more expensive on average, driven by people who have moved into the neighbourhood more recently — but the work is the same work.
The Vinyl Dealers and the Vintage Sellers
The markets that occupied the space between Brick Lane and Spitalfields on Sundays in the early 2000s were not, in their original form, the curated vintage markets that they have become. They were closer to car boot sales: a mixture of genuine junk, interesting junk, things that were not junk but that the seller did not know were interesting, and occasional genuinely valuable items that were priced as though they were the first category. The pleasure of those markets was the pleasure of not knowing what you would find, which is the specific pleasure that curation eliminates: when someone has already decided what is interesting and priced it accordingly, the surprise is gone.
The vinyl dealers — the people who sold records from car boots and folding tables and the back of vans — were operating a market in which knowledge was the advantage. The seller who knew that the pressing was valuable and the buyer who did not was conducting one kind of transaction. The buyer who knew more than the seller was conducting the reverse. Both kinds happened. The market was alive in the way that markets are alive when information is asymmetric and the arbitrage is possible. The vinyl market that operates in Shoreditch now is a curation product: the interesting records have been identified, priced at their known value, and sold to people who knew what they were buying before they arrived. This is fine. It is also not the same thing.
Why the Memory Matters
The memory of what Shoreditch was before it became a destination matters not as a basis for nostalgia but as a guide to where the conditions that produced it still exist. The provisional quality of the pre-destination Shoreditch — the sense that the space was being used for purposes that were not its permanent purpose, at prices that allowed experimentation, by people who were there because they could afford to be there rather than because they had been told to be there — is a quality that moves as rents move. It is in Peckham and Walthamstow and Leyton and parts of Woolwich now, in different forms, with different communities. It will move again as those areas are discovered and their rents reflect the discovery. Understanding the pattern does not stop the pattern. But it does help you find what the pattern is currently producing, which is where the interesting things are, and the interesting things are always worth finding before everyone else does, and then not writing about them too soon.
The question of where the current version of early Shoreditch exists — the provisional, experimental, affordable neighbourhood that has not yet been discovered by the lists — is one that people who know cities ask with increasing urgency as the window between discovery and transformation compresses. The answer changes faster than any fixed answer can capture, but the methodology for finding it is consistent: look for areas where the commercial rents are below the citywide average, where the residential rents are below what similar access to employment and transport would command in comparable areas, and where the physical infrastructure — the old industrial buildings, the railway arches, the converted commercial properties — accommodates the kind of activity that does not fit neatly into categories that have established rental values. By these criteria, the current candidates include parts of south-east London that remain genuinely affordable, pockets of east London that have not yet been fully absorbed into the tourist circuit, and post-industrial sites in outer London that the market has not yet decided to value as creative hubs. These are provisional answers. They will change. The pattern of discovery and transformation will continue. The task of the person who wants to be where interesting things are happening before the lists arrive is the same as it has always been: pay attention before anyone tells you to, find the place before it has a name, and then not write about it too soon. I have violated the last part of this advice by writing this piece. I hope you will forgive me and that the places survive the attention, as they sometimes do and sometimes do not, which is the uncertainty that the provisional quality of an interesting neighbourhood always contains.
Harper-Thames writes from Shoreditch for The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine. Her homepage is at prat.uk/author/harper-thames.
Also archival at The Daily Mash | NewsThump | The Poke
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/shoreditch-before-it-became-destination-why-memory-matters-harper-thames/
