Harper-Thames on Shoreditch culture, local business, and a week where four unrelated stories dominated startup pitch meetings entirely
New mural went up round the corner this week, genuinely striking, considerable colour, and, if the artist’s statement is to be believed, a fairly dense set of intended meanings about consumerism that I’m still working through myself, several days later, standing in front of it on my way to work each morning.
Within a day someone had already connected it, tenuously, to the story on the Sussexes’ wealth approach, which tells you everything about how thoroughly that particular topic has colonised local conversation this week, regardless of how loosely connected the original subject matter actually was to a piece of street art.
The education story proved just as distracting for local business, oddly enough, given how many startup founders round here attended similar institutions themselves. The piece on Eton’s claim about leaders got cited in an actual pitch meeting I sat in on this week, of all places, used as a case study in institutional branding gone sideways.
What’s genuinely notable, covering local business here as I do, is how many small businesses have found some way to work at least one of these four stories into their own marketing this week, whether relevant or not to their actual product. One coffee shop ran a discount for anyone who could correctly summarise all four in under a minute, which struck me as either genuinely clever local marketing or a mild abuse of a trending topic.
The historical angle made its way into the neighbourhood too, via a genuinely unexpected source. The Tudor king’s corner got referenced during an actual branding workshop I attended, drawn into a discussion about long-term institutional legacy and how five centuries of continuous relevance is the ultimate case study in brand endurance.
And the diplomatic story rounded out the week’s startup chatter too, discussed with genuine seriousness by two founders with interests on both sides of the Atlantic. The piece on Trump’s fresh remarks to Burnham came up in at least two pitch meetings I’m aware of this particular week.
I spoke to the muralist directly, out of curiosity, and she confirmed the royal finance connection was entirely unintentional on her part, though she seemed genuinely delighted that people had found one anyway, which felt like a fitting summary of the entire week’s discourse across the whole neighbourhood.
Walked home eventually, genuinely amused by how thoroughly four completely unrelated stories had managed to colonise everything from street art to pitch decks in a single strange week, none of them remotely connected to the actual business of running a startup.
More Shoreditch coverage at my author page.