Shoreditch

• 1. Introduction

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  Shoreditch is the district whose bells promise riches in the nursery rhyme "Oranges and Lemons". The line goes: "when I grow rich say the bells of Shoreditch". The place behind that line lies in the London Borough of Hackney, just north-east of the border with the City of London, and it is counted as part of London's East End.

  Few London names have been argued over for as long as this one. Scholars still cannot agree on what it first meant, and a popular legend about it turns out to be impossible. Why did this patch of ground, just outside the City's reach, become a stage for some of the most famous plays ever written? How did it rise, fall and rise again through centuries of trades, fires, bombs and fashions? And why does the name now stand for a whole way of transforming a city?

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• 2. A Contested Name

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  Soredich, Soresdic and Sordig are the earliest spellings on record, dated to about 1148-1183-4 and 1204. By 1220-21 clerks were writing Schoresdich. Toponymists generally agree that the name comes from the Old English "scoradīc", meaning shore-ditch, where the shore is a riverbank or a prominent slope. They disagree about which shore was meant.

  In 1936 Eilert Ekwall suggested that the ditch led to the shore of the Thames. That idea still circulates widely. Other scholars object that the City of London lies between Shoreditch and the river. John Stow, writing in 1598, used the spelling Sewers Ditche, which hints at a drain or watercourse instead.

  The watercourse theory has support on the ground. The area was once boggy. The main branch of the Walbrook rose in Hoxton and ran along what is now Curtain Road, past the former Curtain Theatre. In this stretch people called it the Deepditch, the Flood Ditch or simply The Ditch.

  Folk tradition prefers a story about Jane Shore, the mistress of Edward IV, who is supposed to have died or been buried in a ditch here. A large painting at Haggerston Branch Library shows her body being retrieved from the ditch. Glazed tiles in a shop on Shoreditch High Street show her meeting the king.

  The legend fails on dates. The Survey of London lists some 26 deeds, written between about 1148 and 1260, that already use a version of the name. Long before Jane Shore lived, the place was Shoreditch. The antiquarian John Weever offered one more theory, naming Sir John de Soerdich, a lord of the manor under Edward III. That claim is also now discredited.

  Beside that old watercourse, a playhouse was about to open that would matter far more than any argument over spelling.

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• 3. Playhouses Beyond the Law

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  In 1574 the authorities of the City of London banned the building of playhouses within their area. Builders turned to the suburbs beyond the City's jurisdiction. Shoreditch, like Southwark, lay outside the control of the somewhat puritanical City fathers, and that made it attractive.

  In 1576 James Burbage built the first playhouse in England and called it "The Theatre". It stood on the site of the Augustinian Holywell Priory, a house of canonesses named after a holy well. The priory had stood from the 12th century until its dissolution in 1539, and nothing of it remains. A plaque on Curtain Road marks The Theatre, and archaeologists from MoLAS excavated the site in 2008.

  The Curtain Theatre followed the next year, 200 yards to the south. A plaque in Hewett Street, off Curtain Road, marks it. William Shakespeare lived close by, in a property overlooking St Helen's churchyard in Bishopsgate Within, inside the City.

  Shakespeare's early plays were first performed at these two theatres. Romeo and Juliet won "Curtain plaudits" here. Henry V was staged within "this wooden O". An early version of Hamlet was also first seen in Shoreditch.

  The lease on The Theatre expired in 1599. Shakespeare's company moved its timbers to Southwark and used them to construct the Globe. The Curtain kept staging plays in Shoreditch until at least 1627.

  Contemporary moralists were furious about the whole neighbourhood. They condemned the "base tenements and houses of unlawful and disorderly resort" around the playhouses. Their lists of sins included beggars' cottages, alehouses, dicing houses, bowling alleys and brothels.

  The parish church, officially St Leonard's, became a resting place for stage people. James Burbage is buried there. So is Richard Burbage, who acted with the Lord Chamberlain's Men, Shakespeare's own company, and was renowned for Hamlet and Richard III. The comedian Richard Tarleton, whom Shakespeare's Yorick is believed to honour, lies there too, along with William Sommers, jester to Henry VIII.

  Christopher Marlowe lived in Norton Folgate, the southern continuation of Shoreditch High Street, and wrote plays for the Shoreditch theatres.

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• 4. Trades and Tenements

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  During the 17th century, wealthy traders and French Huguenot silk weavers settled in Shoreditch and Spitalfields and built a textile industry. The name of the Weaver line railway, which serves the area, still recalls them. By the 19th century furniture-making had become the local trade, and the Museum of the Home on Kingsland Road now commemorates it. Both industries declined in the late 19th century.

  A reminder of the weavers survives on Club Row. Two Huguenot workers' houses stand at the corner of Redchurch Street. Developers wished to knock them down, but the houses were judged of special historic interest, and from 2019 they have been protected from demolition.

  In 1886 the new parish of Holy Trinity, Shoreditch, was created for a growing population. Its first vicar was the Anglo-Catholic priest Arthur Osborne Montgomery Jay, son of William James Jay, chaplain to Duleep Singh. By 1889 the church, with a hall and school, stood on Old Nichol Street.

  Controversially, Holy Trinity hosted a boxing club and gymnasium. Father Jay saw it as vital for reclaiming local men from street brawls. In 1894 the church opened a lodging house, Trinity Chambers. In the 1930s the Holy Trinity parish united with that of St Leonard.

  In 1893 work began on the Boundary Estate, a slum clearance project. More than a century later, in 2006, Tower Hamlets Council proposed transferring the estate to a housing association and upgrading its accommodation. Sprunt Architects fully refurbished one block, Iffley House, to show how this might work. Tenants rejected the proposal in a ballot in November of that year.

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• 5. Music Halls and Melodrama

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  From 1837 until 1940 the National Standard Theatre stood at the corner of Shoreditch High Street, and in the late 19th century it was one of the largest theatres in London. Sims Reeves, Mrs Marriott and James Anderson all appeared there. It also staged classical opera and even Shakespeare, with actors including Henry Irving.

  The rivalry with the West End was fierce. John Douglass, who owned the theatre from 1845, wrote to The Era after a Drury Lane first night. He noted that Drury Lane's new drama used a hansom cab, and claimed that "a hansom cab, drawn by a live horse was used in my drama... produced at the Standard Theatre... with real rain, a real flood, and a real balloon." In 1926 the building became a cinema, The New Olympia Picturedrome, and it was demolished in 1940.

  The Shoreditch Empire, also called The London Music Hall, ran from 1856 to 1935 at 95-99 Shoreditch High Street. Frank Matcham, architect of the Hackney Empire, rebuilt it in 1894. Charlie Chaplin is recorded as performing there in his early days, before he found fame in America. In 1934 the neighbouring drapery business Jeremiah Rotherham & Co bought the building and rebuilt it as a warehouse.

  The Royal Cambridge Music Hall at 136 Commercial Street ran from 1864 to 1936. Fire destroyed it in 1896, and Finch Hill, architect of the Britannia Theatre in nearby Hoxton, rebuilt it in 1897. The trade journal The Builder reported that the new stage would measure 41 feet wide by 30 feet deep, with hot water heating throughout and provision for electric light.

  The halls also produced performers of their own. Hetty King, a famous male impersonator of the music hall, was born in Shoreditch. Her father, William Emms, was a local comedian known as William King.

  None of these buildings survives. The Brick Lane Music Hall briefly revived the tradition in Curtain Road, but it has since moved on. Playbills and posters from the old halls survive in the collections of the Bishopsgate Institute and the Victoria and Albert Museum.

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• 6. War and Decline

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  Mayor Henry Busby Bird and the Borough of Shoreditch raised a pals battalion in the First World War. It served as the 20th (Service) Battalion, Middlesex Regiment (Shoreditch), and was also known as the 'Boxers' Battalion'. The parent regiment had its own nickname, the 'Die-hards'. Volunteers enlisted at Shoreditch Town Hall and trained at Victoria Park and Columbia Market.

  The battalion served on the Western Front from 1916 to 1918 as part of 121st Brigade of 40th Division. It saw action against the Hindenburg Line and at Bourlon Wood. It suffered huge casualties in the German spring offensive of March-April 1918 and returned to England. There it was reconstituted from men of lower medical category, and it went back to Flanders as part of 14th (Light) Division for the final advance. Its memorial is in St Leonard's Church on Shoreditch High Street.

  Syd's coffee stall opened in Calvert Avenue in 1919 and operated continuously until 2019.

  Shoreditch was heavily bombed in the Second World War, and around 495 of its civilian residents were killed. The area was hit by at least 279 high explosive bombs, 6 parachute mines, 7 V-1 doodlebugs and 2 V-2 rockets. Many thousands of 1 kg incendiary devices fell as well.

  Post-war Shoreditch declined. The textile and furniture industries faced competition elsewhere, the Blitz had devastated the housing stock, and insensitive redevelopment made matters worse. In 1970 the London Rail Study proposed a Chelsea-Hackney tube line, with a new station near Shoreditch Church, but it was never carried forward.

  The destruction caused by the two V-2 rockets did leave one legacy. It contributed to the opportunity to create Shoreditch Park and Haggerston Park.

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• 7. Silicon Roundabout

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  Damien Hirst and the curator Joshua Compston, founder of Factual Nonsense, were instrumental in developing the area's art scene in the early 1990s. Compston lived and died in Charlotte Road. Since the 1990s Shoreditch has shifted from a mainly working-class district to a fashionable part of London, closely associated with the creative industries. The DJ and producer Andrew Weatherall is among those who have lived here.

  Former industrial buildings became offices and flats. Curtain Road and Old Street gained clubs and pubs that rival the venues of the West End. Art galleries, bars, restaurants, media businesses and a Hackney Community College campus joined them. Land and property prices rose with the transformation.

  In the mid-1960s the main streets of Shoreditch were formed into a one-way system a mile long. The streets involved were Old Street, Shoreditch High Street and Curtain Road, and Great Eastern Street. The system became linked with traffic congestion, high speeds, high collision rates, poor conditions for walking and cycling, and delays for buses. Critics called it "the main factor holding back the cultural regeneration of South Shoreditch". After a lengthy campaign, the newly formed Transport for London agreed to restore most of the streets to two-way working, completed in late 2002.

  In 2005 funding was announced for the East London Line Extension. It bypassed the old Shoreditch tube station and created a new Shoreditch High Street station closer to the centre. The station stands on part of the old Bishopsgate Goods Yard, which was demolished in 2004. It sits on a viaduct, fully enclosed in a concrete box, so that future building on the rest of the site can proceed while trains keep running. From the 15th of December 2017 London Overground ran 24-hour trains on Friday and Saturday nights.

  During the second dot-com boom, web technology companies gathered around Old Street Roundabout, in what became the East London Tech City district. Last.fm, Dopplr, Songkick, SocialGO and 7digital were among them. The nickname "Silicon Roundabout" followed, and Prime Minister David Cameron used it in a speech in November 2010.

  The name Shoreditch itself has become synonymous with the "hipsterfication" of regenerated urban areas. As a pioneer among similar transformations across the UK, it has given rise to phrases from "Shoreditchification" to "Very Shoreditch".

  South Shoreditch, where the district borders the City of London, is changing most visibly. Five- and six-storey buildings have been knocked down to make way for very tall ones. The Principal Tower in Worship Street, designed by Foster and Partners, stands next to Principal Place, also by Foster and Partners. In July 2014 it was reported that Amazon.com was close to signing a lease for its UK headquarters there. The project had been on hold since January 2012, when the law firm CMS Cameron McKenna, the anchor tenant, pulled out. The developer Hammerson then sold its interest to Brookfield. The developments will yield more homes for sale than the Olympics athletes' village did.

  In 2015 Historic England gave the Stag's Head public house a Grade II listing, protecting a pub amid the towers.

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• 8. Borders and Boroughs

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  At the old crossroads by Shoreditch Church, Old Street and Hackney Road cross Shoreditch High Street and Kingsland Road. Shoreditch was once an extramural suburb of the City of London, centred on this junction. Shoreditch High Street and Kingsland Road follow a short stretch of the Roman Ermine Street, now the A10, also called the Old North Road. It was a major coaching route to the north, leaving the City at Bishopsgate.

  The east-west line of Old Street and Hackney Road was probably also a Roman road. It connected Silchester with Colchester and bypassed the City of London to the south.

  Shoreditch has stable roots in administration. Its boundaries stayed consistent from the Middle Ages until 1965. The ancient parish of St Leonard's lay in the county of Middlesex, within Ossulstone Hundred. In the 1600s the hundred was split into divisions, and Shoreditch joined the Tower Division, also called Tower Hamlets. The men of that division owed military service to the Tower of London, an arrangement that lasted until 1899.

  The Metropolis Management Act 1855 turned the parish into the Shoreditch District of the Metropolis. The London Government Act 1899 made it a Metropolitan Borough. Both kept the old boundaries. The borough was run from Shoreditch Town Hall on Old Street, which has been restored and is now run by the Shoreditch Town Hall Trust.

  Holy Trinity in the Old Nichol was part of Shoreditch for church purposes from 1866, yet administratively it belonged to Bethnal Green. In 1965 Shoreditch was merged with Hackney and Stoke Newington to form the London Borough of Hackney.

  The historic heart of Shoreditch lies south of Old Street, around Shoreditch High Street and Shoreditch Church. Hoxton and Haggerston have been part of Shoreditch since the medieval period. They occupy the north-west and north-east respectively, though their extent has never been formally defined.

  The old Shoreditch tube station closed in 2006. It stood 400 metres outside Shoreditch proper, in Bethnal Green, and its location helped blur perceptions of where the district ends. Its replacement, Shoreditch High Street station, straddles the borough boundary. Since the millennium the area's rising prestige has led businesses in Bethnal Green and Spitalfields to put Shoreditch in their names, and to a lesser extent in the St Luke's area of Islington.

  In 2014 the Boundary Estate and the nearby area came under the East Shoreditch Neighbourhood Forum. The forum status ceased on the 5th of February 2019, but the Neighbourhood Area designation is unaffected.

  On the 3rd of June 2010 Nat Wei, Baron Wei of Shoreditch, was introduced to the House of Lords as a Conservative life peer. He was the youngest non-hereditary peer ever on entry and lives in the area. Since 2005 the Hackney part of Shoreditch has been represented in the House of Commons by Meg Hillier.

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