“A nation of shopkeepers.” It’s one of the classic, resonant phrases which sums up Britain’s centuries-old culture of small-scale, hard-fought independence and individuality, and the traditional (now fast-disappearing) landscape of the country’s high streets and city centres, once filled with family manufacturers and retailers.
And it was a phrase which echoed with a darker edge this past month, as simmering tension and good-old-fashioned opportunism ignited into a weekend of frenzied looting across the country’s larger cities. Far from the action, and tucked safely in front of the television, we watched swarms of anonymous, blurry figures rampaging through shopfronts, stocking up on a tragicomic mix of trainers, plasma screens and value-pack groceries. And the morning after we opened newspapers filled with the aftershocks: page after page of newsagents, barbers, opticians and tailors, standing bleary-eyed in the fragments of thoughtless wreckage which had once been their livelihoods – the luckier ones dealing with broken windows and mangled security shutters, while others were left with burnt ash.
In London, there were a few windows smashed in Belgravia and Notting Hill: but overall, this was a rampage through the city’s more marginal areas: areas which in the last decade have been colonised by new waves of artists and designers driven ever further outwards by the persistent tide of gentrification. Shoreditch, Kingsland, Bethnal Green, Dalston, Hackney, Bermondsey, Deptford, Kensal Rise – names only recently inscribed on the city’s shopping maps, with quirky pop-ups and vintage boutiques, avant-garde boutiques and cool urban labels jostling for street-space with a ragtag mix of butchers, phone stores and kebab shops. Whole new shopping districts like Broadway Market and Redchurch Street developed, building a kind of retail profile of independents and heritage brands that would’ve been simply commercially unfeasible in the chain-dominated West End. And the contrast of luxury and lingering East End grit generated a harder-edged, more skilfully adapted generation of retailing, from Shacklewell Lane’s LN-CC, in a radically transformed Dalston boxing gym, to nearby Hurwundeki’s quirkily ramshackle railway arch conversion, providing a new breed of low-overhead, new talent-friendly outlet.
And that anarchic, messy edge has seeped its’ way into the contemporary London fashion aesthetic – a language cobbled together from the East End’s tangle of cultures, smells and sounds, blazing with texture and intense colour but underscored with a shabbily sturdy, make-do-and-mend pragmatism. The old-school Whitechapel tailors, the fluorescent-bright material shops full of delicate, shimmering sari fabrics, the vibrantly loud street-markets and the acres upon acres of quietly anonymous garment factories have over the years been joined by London’s brightest design talents, weaving their magic in upper floor studios and shared workspaces above the bustling streets. It actually struck me today, walking through New York’s proudly-labelled Garment District, that grid of narrow streets and towering brick factories which still echoes with the buzz of Midtown’s raucous rag trade, that the East End has (unofficially) been London’s Garment District all along.
In early August, many of those designers were marooned in their spare, industrial eyries, beavering away on collections for Fashion Week’s vital showcase while watching and nervously Tweeting as crowds of looters and police surged back and forth below their windows. The intense, panicked fear of those nights – for most of us – is an already-fading memory, but it left behind a city with rawer, more tender edges than before. It remains to be seen whether those edges can be healed, and what the long-term impact of those few violent nights will be in terms of economic confidence and future development for these vital, quintessentially London streets and shopkeepers.
