Factores de riesgo

In fact, a year earlier, The Independent had carried a feature on the East End Open Studios event, and the writer had claimed that the 26 studios which would open their doors to the public

“represent only a small proportion of the thousands of artists who live and work in London’s East End” (Duffin, 1989). Duffin had also organised the Open Studios event, and as we saw in chapter one, her claim for the total number of artists in the East End was probably wide of the mark. Nonetheless, the media myth was up and running, and while we cannot gauge the extent to which the media—here I refer primarily to printed media—has driven the growth of the East End artists’ agglomeration, it would seem counter-intuitive to assume that it has not affected it in some way.

But until the mid-1990s, the media took little notice of the burgeoning population of art- ists on its doorstep. The first three issues of the Guardian’s quarterly Art for Sale magazine, published in April, July and November 1992, incidentally the year of a Whitechapel Open Stu- dios event, make no mention at all of the East End’s population of artists: such mentions of places as there are centre around the traditional gallery districts of Mayfair (Guardian, 1992a; Guardian 1992b; Guardian, 1992c).

By 1995, the “biggest concentration” statistic had reached the Financial Times, which re- ported that in “Hackney, east London, there is the biggest concentration of such [struggling] art- ists in Europe” (Thorncroft, 1995b), a statement which is plain wrong: the majority of the East End’s artists (although not craftspeople, perhaps) are in Tower Hamlets, not Hackney. Other ar- ticles (Packer, 1995; Thorncroft, 1995a) in the Financial Times refer to the East End in passing: it is simply where an interesting gallery show happens to be. In both cases, the venues are the same: Flowers East and Paton Gallery, galleries in the West End mould.

The Whitechapel Open Studios did not take place in 1995, but it did in 1996, and it is in the coverage of it in the Guardian, the Times and the Daily Telegraph (Glaister, 1996; Walters, 1996; Pile, 1996) that we finally see high profile acknowledgement of the phenomenon, pre- senting the East End artists’ agglomeration as a new Paris Left Bank. Glaister’s article was the first to be published, occupying most of page three of the Wednesday July 10th edition. The

Times and the Daily Telegraph followed on Saturday 13th July, carrying broadly similar arti- cles: the Times even included a coloured map of the East End, pointing out where the studios were.

By September 1997, the Guardian was declaring that Shoreditch was fashionable in its “Style” section (Pretlove, 1997), and in November of that year, Hugh Pearman argued that “Remaking the inner cities is easy. Push the button marked Arts, and the money pours in.” (Pearman, 1997). The example with which Pearman chose to illustrate his article was Hoxton. Fifteen months later, in 1999 London Fashion Week Time Out magazine carried an article titled “The hip 100” (Time Out, 1999). The East End, it seemed, had come of age as a fashionable, trendy place: of the “favourite 100 London faces and places” listed, Hoxton was second behind the supermodel Kate Moss. The Truman Brewery in Brick Lane came fourth, the Dragon Bar, near Old Street came eighth, the Hoxton Bar and Kitchen came 12th, while Chapman Fine ART, a gallery run by the Chapman brothers, and Brick Lane and Spitalfields Market were 18th and 19th respectively (ibid).

End as an artists’ quarter: in the first half of the decade, it was simply a place where art could be seen. By the end of the decade, it had become a trendy, bohemian sort of place if magazines such as Time Out are to be believed. In fact, the more recent media coverage has centred on the two places closest to the City, Spitalfields and Shoreditch, and the image presented is of a newly vibrant, central location. This too, is only partially true. Brick Lane, which along with Hoxton Square has been an epicentre of the new “artistic” East End, has been a vibrant cosmo- politan street at least since the early 1980s (when this writer first visited), although Hoxton Square and parts of Shoreditch have become more gentrified during that period. Significantly, the “regeneration” of Brick Lane is very much a white western phenomenon: the new shops are run and populated by young and fashionable westerners, not the local Bangladeshis; curry houses and cafés face each other across the street without seeming to meet halfway; shops full of chairs by Charles Eames and other well-known western designers spill their wares onto the pavement, but there is no cultural reference to the mostly Bangladeshi locality. It is almost as if Brick Lane only became interesting when the media noticed it, and of course that is not quite the case, although the more lively aspect of the northern half of Brick Lane has certainly coin- cided with the heightened media profile of the area.

Within the time frame of this project, however—and this remains a matter of speculation—it seems likely that the media had little or no influence on the growth of the East End artists’ agglomeration: by the time they noticed, it was nearly three decades old. Rather, the media had picked up on a phenomenon that had been “bubbling under” for years, and which the property markets had already begun to exploit. The number of artists had already stopped rising exponentially, and was levelling off as studios closed down in the light of rising property prices, which themselves were no doubt fuelled by media-driven demand. Paradoxically, it may well be the case that media coverage has hastened the demise of the East End artists agglomeration, rather than encouraged it, although that same media attention, catalysed by artists, has also spurred the regeneration of the Brick Lane-Hoxton Square-Old Street axis.