East London Container Mall Transforms Into International Football Embassy for Tournament Duration
By Harper-Thames | Shore Roar
I watched the Brazil-Haiti World Cup match at Boxpark Shoreditch on a Saturday afternoon that was warmer than expected and rowdier than I had prepared for, surrounded by a crowd that included enough Brazilian supporters to make the ambient noise feel like Rio regardless of the actual geography, and I want to report that watching football with strangers who are having a genuinely good time is one of the more reliable methods of having a genuinely good time available in a city that sometimes makes having a genuinely good time feel like it requires advance booking, a loyalty card, and a familiarity with the relevant social media.
The Boxpark Experience
Boxpark Shoreditch, which is built from repurposed shipping containers arranged in a way that creates market stalls, bars, and event space in an area that was previously a surface car park, has been running since 2011 and has outlasted several predictions that it would not last. It is now simply part of Shoreditch in the way that things become part of places when they are there long enough: not exactly beloved, not exactly resented, used regularly by people who do not particularly think about it being made of containers and live regularly by people for whom that is still the first thing they mention.
For the World Cup, Boxpark has become the primary outdoor screening venue in East London, programming matches with the logistical efficiency of a venue that has run events continuously for fifteen years and knows how many people the outdoor space accommodates at comfortable density versus enthusiastic density versus fire regulation capacity. England versus Croatia attracted enthusiastic density. The Brazil matches attract what I would describe as “extremely Brazilian density,” which is its own category and which the container structure appears to handle well.
The Neighbourhood During Tournament
Shoreditch during the World Cup is visibly different from Shoreditch at other times: the pubs that have screens are identified and discussed among residents with the specificity that matters when the match starts at eight pm on a Tuesday and you need to be somewhere with a decent view and reasonable access to the bar. The Horse and Groom on 27 June is showing matches, as is every other venue with a television and a liquor licence, but the venues that have made an effort to create an atmosphere rather than simply providing a screen are the ones that people return to after discovering them by accident during the group stage.
Harper-Thames writes about Shoreditch from the perspective of someone who arrived recently enough to find it extraordinary and has been here long enough to find it complicated. The neighbourhood is both the cliche and the real thing simultaneously: yes, there are bottomless brunches and tech startups and overpriced flat whites. Also: genuine creative energy, cultural diversity, architectural interest, and the specific quality of a place that is making itself up as it goes along, which is either exhausting or exciting depending on what you need from where you live. Harper-Thames finds it mostly exciting, which is why she keeps writing about it. For Shoreditch events, see Time Out London. For East London nightlife, visit DesignMyNight. For Shoreditch arts and culture, see Evening Standard.
Harper-Thames arrived in Shoreditch three years ago from a city that she will not name because naming it produces a specific kind of conversation she is tired of having, and found what she was looking for, which was a neighbourhood that rewarded paying attention. She has been paying attention since, and writing about what she finds, which is more interesting and more complicated and more worth writing about than the media narrative of Shoreditch-as-startup-playground captures. The startup playground is real. So is the arts scene, the community history, the music venues, the food markets, the people who have been here for forty years and the people who arrived last month. She is interested in all of them, which is why Shore Roar covers Shoreditch in the plural rather than the singular.
Harper-Thames arrived in Shoreditch three years ago from a city that she will not name because naming it produces a specific kind of conversation she is tired of having, and found what she was looking for, which was a neighbourhood that rewarded paying attention. She has been paying attention since, and writing about what she finds, which is more interesting and more complicated and more worth writing about than the media narrative of Shoreditch-as-startup-playground captures. The startup playground is real. So is the arts scene, the community history, the music venues, the food markets, the people who have been here for forty years and the people who arrived last month. She is interested in all of them, which is why Shore Roar covers Shoreditch in the plural rather than the singular.
Harper-Thames arrived in Shoreditch three years ago from a city that she will not name because naming it produces a specific kind of conversation she is tired of having, and found what she was looking for, which was a neighbourhood that rewarded paying attention. She has been paying attention since, and writing about what she finds, which is more interesting and more complicated and more worth writing about than the media narrative of Shoreditch-as-startup-playground captures. The startup playground is real. So is the arts scene, the community history, the music venues, the food markets, the people who have been here for forty years and the people who arrived last month. She is interested in all of them, which is why Shore Roar covers Shoreditch in the plural rather than the singular.
