The secret history of Shoreditch

Times

4 days ago

You won't find anyone who doesn't use the word 'grim' somewhere in their recollections of what Shoreditch was like in the early Nineties. The east London neighbourhood on the edge of the City was a vista of Victorian factories and warehouses, Second World War bombsites and tired-looking wholesalers.
Those who discovered its early charms included the renowned art photographer Nick Waplington. 'We needed hardcore iron bars on every window, everything would be nicked by the junkies,' he recalls. 'There were no cops, it was lawless, grey and desolate — but it was a good place for a studio.'
At first Waplington commuted from 'the safety of Camden' to the 10,000 sq ft electricity substation he, along with the artists Jake and Dinos Chapman, used as a studio (and regular rave venue). 'But increasingly I found I was there all the time.' Shoreditch and its environs were slowly populated by the brave and the bohemian. 'There was a definite sense of it being the place to be, but it was still, functionally, quite shit,' says the artist Gavin Turk. Many of the Young British Artists (YBAs) lived and worked in the area — Sarah Lucas and Tracey Emin were pioneers with their live/work/gallery space The Shop, along with future stars like Gary Hume, who occupied a space so large and cold he 'lived in a tent in the middle of it', remembers the artist Darren Coffield. The area became known for its affordability and DIY attitude: when Deborah Curtis had a child with Turk, she opened a makeshift crèche in their warehouse home. The YBA Abigail Lane 'had an 'art salon' at my place because I didn't like going to the hairdresser. I had a large flat, everyone needed their hair cut, I knew a hairdresser.' Several Turner prize afterparties were held there too.
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More artists were lured by the eccentric curator Joshua Compston, who set up a gallery called Factual Nonsense on Charlotte Road in the heart of Shoreditch, opposite the Bricklayers Arms pub. With his vision for an art-driven bohemian community, he would be a bridge, persuading suspicious local landlords to rent to artists, whom he coaxed into the area. The artist and film director Sam Taylor-Johnson has described Compston as 'the dandy romantic of that time'.
His happenings included the Fete Worse Than Death on Charlotte Road in 1993 and 1995, a chaotic street party with stalls by the YBAs who lived in the surrounding streets. Angus Fairhurst and Damien Hirst were made up as clowns by the performance artist Leigh Bowery: for £1 you'd get a spin painting, for 50p more a flash of Hirst's wedding tackle. Tracey Emin had a kissing tent and made rum cocktails.
However, as the artist Simon Bill says in Factual Nonsense, a book about Compston's short life (he died, aged 25, in 1996): 'By 1999 the [Compston] era was forgotten … because there were young people with new hairstyles moving in.'
Shoreditch's fame was due in some part to the nightlife that was flourishing there. In 1999 the promoter Neil Boorman launched the magazine Shoreditch Twat, the twisted child of Private Eye and a parish magazine. 'We never had it so good — design, music, art, fashion, clubs, architecture, technology — a mass convergence of grassroots culture. We will never have that symbiotic IRL moment again,' he says now. 'The geographic locus, the economy booming, property still cheap, everyone contained in a few streets.'
Rob Star, the owner of the bar Electric Star, first came to the area in the mid-Nineties to club nights at the Blue Note, including Goldie's Metalheadz, and was also struck initially by the apocalyptic bleakness. 'You had to know where to go to discover what was really going on.' Star moved into a warehouse and threw parties there — for which he would become famous. He even started a festival, Eastern Electrics, in the area. 'It's no exaggeration to say that by the Noughties the area was as influential for nightlife as Berlin. Hackney council had to employ someone full time just to manage all the TENs — temporary event notices.'
The haircuts kept coming and changing. A style magazine called Dazed & Confused set up offices on Old Street. Its editors — the photographer Rankin, the publisher Jefferson Hack and the stylist Katie Grand — lured even more famous people to the area. In 1996 Hack persuaded Radiohead's Thom Yorke to play an acoustic gig in an old tramshed. I was there and remember him telling the media twats at the back to shut up.
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'I wish I'd had my camera,' Waplington says, 'the night I popped over to [the photographer] Phil Poynter and [the stylist and Alexander McQueen collaborator] Katy England's place. Lee [McQueen] was there, Robbie Williams, Chloë Sevigny, Kate Moss … They all did an impromptu fashion show. I thought, is this really happening?'
While there was no membership to pay, only talent to declare, Shoreditch was as impenetrable as any St James's gentlemen's club. Fashion was here, led by the phenomenon of talent and tailoring that was Alexander McQueen, who lived and worked in Hoxton Square. London Fashion Week was no longer the weird, ugly cousin ofthe more relevant and glamorous Paris, Milan and New York. The Bricklayers Arms became a fashion centre, full of McQueen's 'bumsters' trousers. A young Central Saint Martins graduate called David Waddington was managing the pub: 'East was no nirvana but it was quite something being at the centre of things.'
The journalist Stacey Duguid moved to the area in the mid-Nineties and worked in another old-school Shoreditch boozer that would be reborn as a hip haunt, the Golden Heart. She remembers the moment when she grasped the power of her postcode. 'My flatmate [the fashion designer Marcus Constable] and I had matching black mullets. We all had mullets. Maybe Katy England started that. Very quickly that exact haircut was on the new Gucci ads. Seeing your hairstyle on a major brand campaign was odd.'
The bars flourished and grew. The haircuts got madder —Star even had an event series called Mulletover, named after the infamous cut. Banksy arrived from Bristol, bringing graffiti into the mix, or 'street art' as it was now called. The street artists' HQ was the Dragon Bar, owned by Justin Piggott, the brother of Marcus of the influential fashion photographers Mert and Marcus. His girlfriend was Fee Doran, aka Mrs Jones, who styled Kylie. Then in 2005 Nathan Barley arrived on Channel 4. Barely ten years on from the second Fete Worse Than Death, this crucible of talent, spunk and youth was reduced to a parody beyond the self-critique in Shoreditch Twat. Two of the greatest satirists of their generation, a pre-Black Mirror Charlie Brooker and a post-Brass Eye Chris Morris, had been stalking the Shoreditch community and skewered all of it: the irony, the clothes, the language, the technology and obtrusive ring tones, the abject hedonism, the enormous self-regard and, of course, the haircuts and complex coffee orders. In fact, Barley's order looks reserved by today's standards: 'I want a real special coffee today, yeah. Triple size, four shots in it, and the best foam you've ever squirted from your milky pumps.'
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How did the cultural phenomenon of Shoreditch become a seven-part joke on TV at 10pm on a Friday? In one episode, one of the only sane protagonists wakes up after a big night out with his hair covered in house paint and beer bottle tops. Doing the walk of shame he is hailed as a style leader and copied. 'People dressed head to toe in some mad avant-garde designer just to get a quick coffee,' Star says. 'There were some pretty daft fashion trends. But anything out there like that is ripe to be pilloried by people who don't get it.'
Yet Nathan Barley did nothing to harm Shoreditch. 'It stayed as a base for so many creative industries until about 2012,' Star says. 'Then it became an enemy of its own success — things combined to take it mainstream and a bit sterile, not least that it was now incredibly expensive to live there.'
A few years on and the Shoreditch roots of experimentation and bravery filtered down into even the smallest of rural towns: think fancy coffee shops with exposed brick walls and turntables for vinyl, the Poundland offers on jam-jar-shaped drinking glasses, sweatshirts with 'Shoreditch' written on them in a 'Harvard' typeface seen as far afield as Sydney, and those funny, wonky haircuts on the walls of high street salons that aped the area's famous mullet and Hoxton fin.
Now 50 and a vice-president at Coach, Boorman says Shoreditch was the epicentre of cultural cool, 'but there were elements that we needed to be irreverent about'. Indeed, Waplington remembers a certain cruelty. 'One night in the 333 [the socialite] Tamara Beckwith turned up and the whole crowd started a tribal chant, 'F*** off back to Notting Hill.' ' One wonders where the assembled crowd were from — certainly not the former wasteland that was now London's most fashionable neighbourhood. 'She left the club in tears.'
The YBAs left too. The next generation of creatives would emerge out of more affordable places: the man fêted as the new McQueen, the designer Gareth Pugh, squatted an old gym in Peckham; they went to Emin's hometown, Margate; or they moved to more affordable streets deeper east.
Boorman's personal death knell was 'when a wealthy Shoreditch twat bought a flat above a popular bar and promptly got the council to close it. The later arrivals drawn magnetically to the vibe always proceed to kill it.'
And there might be a great place to stop, were it not for a twist in the tale: Shoreditch is still full of great shops, restaurants and denizens who are early adopters of the trends that will shape us normals in years to come. One of those tired-looking wholesalers, Dream Bags Jaguar Shoes, is an arts and party space still going strong 25 years after opening. It might have experimental DJs playing Jamie xx, Fred Again and Bicep on one night, and a poetry collective the next. Shoreditch still has it, it's just that more people know about it now and, yes, it's expensive. But with property struggling, Star has recently returned because he sees the corporate influence declining and creative talent moving back. It's real, Shoreditch is having a second coming. What's bad for the economy is good for struggling creatives. As Barley might say, 'That's well coincimental.'