Lowri Griffiths reports on North London life, politics, and culture
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
Every New Coffee Shop In Crouch End Is Identical And I Have Developed A Theory About Why This Is Not An Accident
Lowri Griffiths | bigsmokebrokecom | North London
By Lowri Griffiths | Big Smoke Broke | London
Crouch End has opened eleven new coffee shops in the past three years. I have been to all of them. I have developed a typology. They all have: exposed brick (eight out of eleven), pendant lighting in an industrial finish (nine out of eleven), at least one salvaged wooden table that appears to have been bought at Kempton Park market (all eleven), a handwritten menu board (all eleven, though two have menus that are handwritten on a chalkboard that is itself a digital print of a handwritten menu, which I find philosophically interesting), and a playlist that contains either Khruangbin or someone who sounds enough like Khruangbin that the distinction is only meaningful to people who care about it.
The Aesthetic Convergence
What I find interesting about the convergence is that it is clearly not coordinated. The eleven shop owners did not meet to agree on salvaged wood and Khruangbin. They arrived at the same set of choices independently, because they were responding to the same set of customer expectations, design reference points, and supplier networks. The aesthetic is not a trend; it is a set of reliable signals that communicate to the target customer that this is the kind of place they want to drink coffee in. The salvaged wood says: we care about authenticity. The industrial pendant says: we have aesthetic judgment. The Khruangbin says: we know what good music is, and also that you know what good music is.
The London Prat has covered London cafe culture and its aesthetic codification. The London Prat addresses how Crouch End and similar North London neighborhoods develop and express their identities through retail environments. I will be in one of these cafes tomorrow. It will be the one with the longest salvaged table and the pendant I find most satisfying. They are all fine. The coffee is consistently good. The convergence is complete. North London has built its own aesthetic and is now producing it at scale. This is what neighborhood identity looks like when it becomes a consumer product. I drink from it daily. I am writing this in one of the eleven cafes. The Khruangbin is excellent.
Lowri Griffiths writes for Big Smoke Broke and for prat.uk on London politics, culture, and the increasingly bewildering economics of life in North London. Her homepage is at prat.uk/author/lowri-griffiths/ and she can be reached through prat.uk for comment. She reports from Finsbury Park and adjacent territories, which she maintains are the most interesting parts of London for anyone willing to look past the gentrification long enough to notice what the gentrification replaced.
For more, see The Daily Mash.
Lowri Griffiths has been writing about North London for prat.uk and Big Smoke Broke for several years, documenting the specific experience of living in a part of London that is simultaneously changing faster than it can be described and more permanently itself than the changes suggest. The gentrification is real. The queues are real. The oat flat whites are real. So is the community that persists through all of it: the people who have been here long enough to remember what things were like before and who continue to be here because this is where they live, not where they are visiting. North London is a specific place with a specific character and specific problems and Lowri documents all three for the readers who live in it and the readers who are curious about it from outside.
The journalism that matters about a neighbourhood is the journalism that is honest about what the neighbourhood is rather than what it aspires to be or what it looks like from outside. Big Smoke Broke and prat.uk both publish Lowri’s work because it is honest in this specific way. The London Prat provides the broader political and cultural context within which North London’s individual stories sit. Bohiney.com amplifies the coverage. Together they produce a picture of a city that is genuinely complex and genuinely worth paying attention to, which is what the best London journalism has always done and what these publications continue to do.
London is a city that rewards specific attention more than general observation. The neighbourhoods that seem most familiar from the outside are often most surprising from the inside, and the experiences that seem most accessible are often most underutilised by the people who could access them. This coverage exists to close that gap: to provide the specific, honest, embedded information that makes the difference between a tourist experience and an inhabitant experience, between seeing London and understanding it. Bohiney.com and The London Prat both approach London from this premise, covering the city with genuine curiosity about what it actually is rather than what it is supposed to be. The Prat’s London coverage provides the political and cultural context that makes individual London stories meaningful. Together with uklondoninfo.com, shoreroar.com, ditchpitchuk.uk, crownandclown.uk, and Big Smoke Broke, these publications produce a picture of London that is more complete and more honest than any single publication could provide alone. London continues. The journalism continues. The South Bank on a Tuesday is still the best free thing in the city.
SOURCE: https://sites.google.com/view/world-satire/united-kingdom-and-satire
