When I grow rich, say the bells of Shoreditch
August 11th, 2008
St. Leonard’s is the “when I grow rich” church at the top of Shoreditch High Street, nestled among the strip clubs, council houses and bars, and watching over the gradual accretion of art galleries (including the one I live above) and design stores. The churchyard is always full of men in long coats sharing bottles, but this looks more and more like a station in their retreat. As the galleries spread and new businesses like the Days Hotel spring up (bringing understandably bewildered Japanese tourists on package holidays to Hackney Road), the streets are getting busier and less dangerous, and you stand a decent chance now of flagging down a taxi when you need one.
There is a lot to like about this area, not least the awareness of how quickly it is changing from dangerous to merely “edgy”: ”Live East, Die Young” is a common slogan on hoodies and art student leather jackets; that’s not the sort of thing you would wear if “Murder Mile” were really still a good description of your neighborhood.
On Saturday, Manny came by with a van to help me take my things to charity. On Sunday, I finished my inventory of possessions, and on Monday the movers came and hauled everything away. It’s funny how quickly you can go from being constrained (with furniture, property, and obligations) to being free. Three days, really. It’s even funnier how much respect you get from other drivers when you’re behind the wheel of a big white van — it looked to Manny and myself like regard for the working man, but maybe it was fear for their paint jobs.
When I was saying my goodbyes, my landlord (an artist and entrepreneur who turned this old handbag factory into a beautiful apartment block) told me, “The business culture here is aggressive, it goes back to the Angles and the Saxons — everyone is out for what they can get. If I were a man your age, I would get out of London and settle somewhere else.” I’m not sure if China is going to be any kind of respite from aggressiveness and selfishness, but it will have the advantage of seeming more like a game, since the experience will be filtered through a language and culture that are more foreign to me than the near relation of English. (What is the American relationship with the British, exactly? You sometimes hear Brits talk of “our American cousins” (when they are being friendly), but I always imagine Britain to be like an uncle — sometimes literally avuncular, sometimes like the old men in the Monty Python skit who say, “Back in MY day, our dad used to wake us up four hours before we went to bed, feed us a lump of cold poison, then we had to walk to school barefoot in the snow UPHILL in both directions…kids these days!”)
This is some of what I will miss:
- Victoria Park, which on Bonfire Night last year hosted one of the best fireworks display I’ve ever seen (including Edokawa’s hanabi)
- Broadway Market and the cupcakes (made by a fellow Californian transplant)
- Hoxton Square and Curtain Road
- The host of strip clubs within five minutes’ walk of my flat (I did intentionally visit every one of them at least once, but I did not spend nearly as much time there as I would have before I lived in Tokyo)
- Columbia Road’s flower market, and the two restaurants on the east side: The Sting Ray Globe Cafe and Laxeiro
- Brick Lane and the 24-hour Beigel [sic] Bake
- The outdoor picnic benches at The Vibe Bar
- The vandals/”street artists” who make living in Hackney a kind of treasure hunt:
- New Tayyab’s (I guess this is technically in Whitechapel, but it beats all the Bangladeshi places on the more famous Brick Lane by a mile)
- Regent’s Canal
- All the art galleries
- The accent! And someone once really did ask me to pass him his ‘titfer’ (= hat)
- Sausage and Mash Cafe at Spitalfields
Oranges and lemons,
Say the bells of St. Clement’s.
You owe me five farthings,
Say the bells of St. Martin’s.
When will you pay me?
Say the bells of Old Bailey.
When I grow rich,
Say the bells of Shoreditch.
When will that be?
Say the bells of Stepney.
I’m sure I don’t know,
Says the great bell at Bow.