On gentrification, the artisanal everything, and the things we lose

Writing for The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine, I report from my local high street, which has, over the years I have lived here, transformed beyond recognition. My other dispatches from this changing corner of London are collected at my page, and many of them have, I notice, become elegies for shops that no longer exist.

The Census of the High Street

I conducted, the other morning, an informal census of my high street, and the results were instructive. Four coffee shops, each artisanal, each charging a sum for a flat white that my grandmother would have considered a down payment on a house. Two shops selling expensive candles. A place that sells only houseplants. A shop devoted entirely to a single variety of cheese. A boutique selling clothing so minimal it appears to be sold by weight of absence.

What my high street does not have, I discovered when I needed one, is anywhere to buy a screwdriver. The hardware shop, which had stood for decades, which sold screwdrivers and nails and the thousand small practical things that a neighbourhood actually needs, closed some time ago, and in its place is one of the coffee shops, or perhaps the candle shop, I lose track. To buy a screwdriver now requires a journey, a quest, an expedition to some distant retail park where the practical things have been exiled.

The Artisanal Everything

I have nothing against coffee, or candles, or houseplants, or even, in moderation, cheese. The shops are pleasant. The coffee is good. The candles smell lovely. The change has brought genuine improvements, and I do not wish to be the sort of person who romanticises the past simply because it was the past. The old high street had its grim shops too, its shuttered units and its sad pound stores.

But there is something lost in the transformation, something beyond any individual shop, which is the high street’s function as a place that served the actual practical needs of the people who lived around it. The artisanal everything is lovely, but it is not useful. It serves desire rather than need, the occasional indulgence rather than the daily necessity. A neighbourhood needs somewhere to buy a screwdriver, and increasingly, mine does not.

The Forces at Work

The transformation of the high street is the visible surface of deeper forces, the rising rents that price out the practical shops with their thin margins, the changing demographics that bring residents who want flat whites rather than screwdrivers, the relentless economic logic that favours the high-margin indulgence over the low-margin necessity. Organisations like the Greater London Authority study these patterns, the slow reshaping of the city’s neighbourhoods by the pressures of money and change.

I do not blame the coffee shops, or the candle shop, or even the rents, exactly, any more than I blamed the developers for the dying pubs. These are the impersonal forces of a changing city, and the people running the new shops are simply trying to make a living in a market that rewards the artisanal over the practical. But I mourn what is lost, the hardware shop, the practical high street, the neighbourhood that served its residents’ needs rather than their indulgences.

The Deeper Loss

The deeper loss, I think, is one of texture, of the mix that made a neighbourhood feel like a real place rather than a lifestyle backdrop. The old high street, with its hardware shop and its greengrocer and its slightly grim cafe alongside whatever else, was a place where different kinds of people, with different kinds of needs, all found something. The new high street, uniform in its artisanal pleasantness, serves a narrower range of people and needs, and in doing so loses some of the variety that made the neighbourhood whole.

This is gentrification, of course, the process by which neighbourhoods are improved and impoverished at once, made nicer and less various, more pleasant and less real. It is not a villain to be defeated but a process to be understood, with its genuine improvements and its genuine losses, its better coffee and its vanished screwdrivers.

The Quest for a Screwdriver

I did, in the end, find a screwdriver. It required a journey to a distant retail park, a place of vast sheds and enormous car parks, where the practical things of life have been gathered and exiled from the neighbourhoods that once contained them. I bought my screwdriver, and a few other practical things while I was at it, and I returned to my transformed high street with its four coffee shops and its candles and its single variety of cheese.

The Neighbourhood That Remains

For all my mourning, the neighbourhood remains, transformed but recognisable, improved and impoverished but still, somehow, itself. The people are still here, the old residents alongside the new, the long-timers who remember the hardware shop and the newcomers who know only the coffee. The community persists beneath the changing shopfronts, in the relationships that outlast any individual shop, in the familiar faces that remain familiar even as the businesses around them change. A neighbourhood, I have come to understand, is not its shops, though its shops shape it; it is its people, and its people endure, adapting to the artisanal everything, finding their screwdrivers at the distant retail park, gathering in whatever pub survives, making their temporary homes in their unloved flats. The high street will keep changing, the coffee shops multiplying, the practical shops vanishing, and I will keep mourning each loss and adapting to each change, because that is what it means to live in a city, to love a place that does not stay the same, to grieve what goes while making peace with what comes. My neighbourhood is not what it was. It is not, I suspect, what it will be. But it is, for now, home, screwdriver shortage and all.

And I bought a flat white, because it was there, and it was good, and I am not immune to the pleasures the new high street offers. I sat with my expensive coffee and my hard-won screwdriver and I thought about the neighbourhood, improved and impoverished, nicer and less various, and I felt the particular melancholy of the long-term resident who has watched a place change into something pleasant and unfamiliar, and who misses, more than they expected to, the shop where you could buy a screwdriver.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com