The Unbearable Lightness of Shoreditch
Ask me where I’m living and I will say just behind Hoxton Station in a certain smug way that pre-empts how impressive I think you are going to find it.
After three years in London I’m finally here, the cool boroughs of student myth, the cool boroughs where the streets are paved with vintage, organic cobblestones and quirky edgy theme bars. This is the place, after all, where I spent many of the best nights of my student life – drag queen karaoke, the pleasures and pains of dates in Underbelly and Square Bar and a higher proportion of great meals than anywhere else in the whole city.
However, I’ve come to realise what made these moments so memorable was that I was always arriving from without East London, from the rather more mundane Kentish Town, New Cross or Bloomsbury, and after I had had a great night I could return back to another place. A place with supermarkets, and charity shops and tatty little second hand book shops, somewhere resolutely uncool, but ultimately slightly homey and familiar.
The best way to describe Shoreditch, in comparison, is to say that it is like Disneyland. It is fun to go there a few times, ride Space Mountain and the other big famous rides and be among the larger-than-life Disney characters. Recently, I have found myself living right in the heart of the Magic Kingdom and the more time I spend there, the more I realise the characters are just ordinary people in exaggerated costumes.
The fairy tale castle is made of Styrofoam and in turn, the substance of the place feels equally as lightweight. Visits to Disneyland are not overwhelming because you know you are only forty five minutes from Paris proper and that you’re going home anyway in five days or so, but without that escape clause, the whole experience of the ‘Disney-fied’ quickly becomes suffocating.
Sure, there are plenty of places I enjoy and have enjoyed in Shoreditch, such as the rooftop terrace of Queen of Hoxton with some new friends. There’s ridiculously good steak tartar at Monikers in Hoxton Square, which is doubly cool for having half a tube train on its top floor and I’m quite partial to the giant neon peacock by the toilets of the Electricity Showrooms.
However, like that electric bird it really is only light, flamboyance and display without content, empty gestures that after the novelty has worn off are just gaudy, shiny distractions to good conversation with good friends or good music, which surely are the important elements of an excellent night out.
As much as I have enjoyed these bars on the few times I’ve visited, I can’t imagine I will bother to return any time soon now that I know their surprises and kitsch supplies. Although you could argue that the great thing about Hoxton is that there are always new surprises and new spaces and places to explore and experience, even the constant novelty in itself quickly becomes a routine.
Somehow it becomes boring and I find myself increasingly jealous of my friends in their sleepy semi-suburbias with soul and warmth that you just cannot get from an ironically bare light bulb in E2.
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