Hipster season: East London in the sun

Broadway market circa 2014

The first thin rays of spring sun reigned down on East London yesterday, drawing out its indigenous population of hipsters, cockneys, naturalised immigrants and the displacing middle classes from their flat shares, tower blocks and terraces and onto the streets, parks and markets of Hackney.

But at this time of year, it’s the hipsters who are the most visible around the increasingly sophisticated streets of Bethnal Green, priced out of their natural habitats around Old Street and Shoreditch, now often spotted around Hackney’s grimier environs: the streets yet to be gentrified by the City and Canary Wharf backwash, where Turkish kebab houses bide their time against the onslaught of multinationals.

I don’t mind them, the trendies, with their self-conscious hats, ironic glasses and carefully constructed dishevelment. I might have even had pretensions to be one once, back in my style magazine days, when I wore a much loved vintage fur from Portobello Market and rode a beaten up pistachio Vespa. Yesterday, though, I wore boot cut jeans, not with irony, but because they were clean, and more importantly, they fit. I abandoned designer sunglasses years ago. What with two kids and a predisposition towards losing things, I now rock a pair that were left round my house after a party two years ago and never claimed. I had more disposable income in my student years. These days, I have perfected the art of looking like I’m not trying by not trying at all.

But I don’t envy the fresh faced dispossessed of the hungover generation. If ever I’m feeling insecure, all I need to do is check house prices. When all is said and done, at least I have a firm footing on the London housing market, even if I no longer have the time, energy or liquidity to make the most of its trendy nightlife.

These days East London has as much to offer those who moved in when prices were still reasonable many of whom have since sprogged and are property rich, if cash poor, as the cavern bars of Dalston meant for the incoming youth. But in the end, it’s always the settlers among East London’s constantly evolving demographic who end up getting priced out.

I took Jonah, at great personal cost, to an ‘electro dough’ workshop to learn how to make a circuit out of a battery pack, LEDs, crocodile clips and some conductive play dough in an effort to get him off Minecraft and spark an interest in the burgeoning tech sector that is taking over the locale. It was situated down a cobbled Hackney back alley, home to a smattering of uber trendy galleries and pop up aperol spritz bars beginning to elbow out the bodyshops and scrap yards that have long propped up the crumbling arches of Hackney’s Victorian infrastructure. Run by a company called – naturally – Technology Will Save Us, which also runs ‘make your own video game’ sessions and the like, the workshop was designed to appeal to the increasingly affluent tech classes which are being attracted to the area by the tech hubs around Shoreditch’s ‘Silicone Roundabout’ and the Olympic Park. For the mother of an aspie kid, it represented the perfect opportunity to bond with a child whose idea of art is to draw a googleplex. Having never quite grasped the principles of circuits at school (I was more of a linguist) we both learned something, although Jonah was more interested in mixing play dough colours and creating lines of dough blobs than making his LEDs light up. Ostensibly two hours, the session got a bit dull, on a sunny weekend, after an hour and a half. And at thirty odd quid a ticket, it’s a tough sell to the area’s thriftier parents, however keen. Rather than kids from the local housing estates, the session attracted pushy parents from as far away as St Albans, who had taken taxis and must have been back-footed by the location’s derelict appearance. But for the money, we received a kit (dough not included, though) to take home for Tom to do with Ava, and Jonah, who had said the session was fun – high praise indeed, coming from him – wants to come back to learn how to make video games on a circuit board computer – something I hope may make him take a renewed interest in his Raspberry Pi, on which Tom is learning with him how to code Minecraft. It’s slow progress.

We left and sat in the weak sun at a recently opened bar/restaurant overlooking the Regent’s Canal, at the fag end of Hackney’s increasingly less grimy high street,  waiting for Tom and Ava to come biking up the canal from our Tower Hamlets townhouse, where we shared a slice of £4.00 chocolate and pear tart, and I chocked on a pot of Earl Grey, huffing on my e-cig.

Afterwards, we biked up the graffitied tow path, past the rusted amphitheater of the gasworks to the heaving Broadway Market, which has extended beyond recognition since we first came across it nearly ten years ago, when it was just a single street of artisanl products. Now, you can buy ten pound duck burgers and all manner of overpriced gourmandise, plus vintage extortion aplenty for the hipster wannabes and stitch-it-yourself parents desperate to fit in with their identifying tribe. We sat in Netil Market in the playground of a local school and ate buttermilk marinaded chicken burgers and drank alkalised water – really – with our coats off in the sun while a mildly aggressive beaded guy in a turban harangued bystanders for change for watching him make supersized bubbles out of old rope and fairy liquid.

The tourist machine of Hackney’s make do and mend community is in full swing and they all need to justify their ever increasing rents.

We went home to drink supermarket beers in the sun in our south facing astroturfed postage stamp, but we discovered, now the sun’s finally appeared, the neighbours’ trees block it out for most of the day. Six hundred grand, and I still can’t sit in the sun in my own backyard. I had a rant about getting next door’s landlord to cut them down. Tom says we’ll probably need to offer to pay half, such is the need to incentivise everyone to do anything, patciaulrly absent landlords.

We got the kids’ bikes out and they did circuits of the public paths around the eco park at the end of our street, and sat on a damp patch of scrub while the sun went down. Who needs a back garden anyway? It’s days like these when I know I wouldn’t want to scratch a living anywhere else in the world.

Broadway market circa 2012