“Just walk around Shoreditch on the first Thursday of the month — the number of creative types would leave any banker feeling ostracized.”

I lived in Shoreditch from 1992-1998. you could rent or buy a genuine industrial loft for less than a tenth of the current price (A 1000sq. ft loft was less than 40,000 GBP then). At the time the area had the largest number of artists in Europe.

I visited Shoreditch for the first time in 5 years, a month ago. In the bars, stores and in the East London branch of Soho House, there were many bankers mixing with locals. The mix of people was reminiscent of the denizens of West London’s gentrified areas such as Notting Hill in the 80s. People ranged from trust fund hipsters to bankers to students and some locals, but there was no indication of cutting edge artists compared to somewhere like Berlin.

I would suggest that Shoreditch is actually emblematic of London’s imminent decline. Like New York’s Williamsburg, it looks gritty like when it was cool, but has an enormous amount of money flowing through it which distracts people from the fact that it is no longer a creative center.

The majority of artists have gone from Shoreditch and the flow of money is about to shut off. It will still be gritty but in a depressing, empty way, like a boarded up nightclub.

And as Ben says, it’s still a blast here.