Rising East Online

Creative London

Postal Coded

—Richard Woolfenden

The Soho House people have set up in East London. They’ve got a five-storey block on Ebor Street [E1] and have called it Shoreditch House. I believe it has an infinity pool on its rooftop terrace. The manager of The Old Truman Brewery on Brick Lane [E1] tells me all units are full. Ditto the manager of the Artists Studio Company (ASC) on Vyner [E2], a street with more galleries that I can count. Nearby on Wadeson Street [E2], carved from the same post-industrial shell, is Bistrotheque – East London’s premier urban restaurant (did you know that AA Gill has been there and liked it?). The Tea Building [E1] on the corner of Shoreditch High Street and Bethnal Green Road opened in 2003 and is jammed with creative companies. A community/art house cinema and cultural centre – Rich Mix [E1] – is another addition, a few metres further east from the Tea Building and Shoreditch House.

As far out as Bromley-by-Bow, Three Mills Studios [E3] is busy with filmmakers; Tim Burton and Danny Boyle being recent occupants. And to top it all, Rough Trade have opened a 5,000 square foot music superstore just off Brick Lane called... wait for it... Rough Trade East. And I thought downloads had killed the bricks and mortar CD trade. Not in the East, apparently!

The Hoxtonisation of E1 continues, but developments in E2 and even E3 show that creative regeneration is moving eastwards. On the eve of the millennium the joke was that anyone who lived slightly north up the Kingsland Road [E8] in Hackney or east of Brick Lane in Bethnal Green [E2], would slip Hoxton into their addresses because Hoxton was cool and synonymous with a BOHO, loft-living, creative, new media explosion. But that’s so nineties, we’re all hip now. I wear my E2 badge with pride and look down on the jaded E1ers and the hopeful E3ers. I know where it’s at and that’s Bethnal Green. Bring on the cultural postcode tribe wars!

How parochial... I don’t know what came over me. Xube, my production company, moved from Brixton to Bethnal Green last summer – and we haven’t looked back. Apart from the fact that my business partner and I have both halved our commuting time and can cycle to work (we live further east), the area feels like it has a lot to offer. Proximity to the City and Central London (to make those all important deals in); two nearby parks (to do that free-associating in), and lots of great restaurants and bars (to do the…. you get the picture).

Obvious reasons to build a creative business here – but is the area really that creative? This article isn’t the place, and I’m not the right person, to give a critique of the misappropriation of the “c” word in all aspects of our daily usage. Mea culpa – I’m one of many who have over-used and abused the word to fit some agenda. But if the growth of the creative industries in E2 simply means that more people are living and working in the area who in some way want to: make art or films; produce interesting viral videos and documentaries; design spaces or ground-breaking Web 2.0 services or something in, or related, to these areas – then it’s happening.

Is there a creative buzz? Is everyone getting sticky with each other’s content, collaborating and sharing ideas? I can’t speak for anyone else, but with small steps Xube is making connections and “getting into our area”. Our modernised early nineteenth century industrial unit houses architects, interior designers, gig promoters and pop promo editors. Exponetic – a web development company – have worked with us on two cd-rom projects and we’re just about to do a website. Unfortunately for us, they’re moving to Spitafields [E1] because they are expanding. Traitors! Oh well, it’s only a 15 minute walk down Brick Lane and over to Commercial Road. Meanwhile Xube has filmed a few training and viral projects on our street, Derbyshire Street. The well-kept, terraced houses facing Weaver’s Fields – East London’s last green space before the City – have a certain filmic ambience. Don’t tell the locals but we call it Xube’s back lot. Don’t just film “what you know”, film “where you know”.

On Brick Lane I recently bumped into Alan Miller, the managing director of the Old Truman Brewery and a pioneer of East London’s cultural regeneration in the 1990s. We did the short walk to Shoreditch House where he had a meeting (there you go, I know at least one member). As we walked and talked he bemoaned some of the more opportunistic developments in the area, whilst looking wistfully at buildings he had tried to develop but local planning restrictions held him back.

Although developments are happening now, the whole regeneration process does seem to be slow and spasmodic. I moved to London in 1992 from Manchester and I remember how East London was being talked-up back then, but it seems to have taken seventeen years to get to this point and there is still so much further to go. Maybe I’ve got it all wrong and this is the end. With the City creeping into Spitalfields and the Olympic Park in Stratford [E15] bordering Bow [E3], perhaps the creatives are just going to get squeezed out. On the other hand we could be the tasty Creative filling in a toasted Finance and Sport ciabatta sandwich.

An article on East London that didn’t mention Pellici’s Cafe, jellied eels or the Krays: there’s creative innovation for you.

Richard Woolfenden is Director of Xube www.xube.co.uk

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