Guide to Shoreditch
By rights Shoreditch should be over, its flame burnt out. In its late nineties/early noughties heyday it essentially invented a new sort of London; reimagining an infamous part of the city as a kind of live/work creative playground, a place of grit and glitter with its own studiedly urban glamour. For the generation who flocked to it then it was a place of warehouse parties, private views, pubs that spilled chaotically on to the street. In those days, it was a porous neighbourhood where the wealth of the nearby City to the south and genteel Islington to the west rubbed up against the storied east end; a thrillingly shady place with its mob families, drug dealers, aged boxers. Back then, gangsters took the best tables at Charlie Wrights, YBAs bought rounds at the bar, start-ups riding on the first dot.com boom threw ridiculous parties, everybody smoked fags (inside!), nobody used the word ‘hipster.’