Cyndi Himmelstiere on Shoreditch life, local gossip, and Britain’s billionaire film obsession
Brunch in Shoreditch this week came with a side of unsolicited documentary opinions at every table I passed, delivered with the same confidence usually reserved for someone’s third coffee order or a genuinely strong opinion about oat milk. Apparently nobody in E1 can order avocado toast anymore without also weighing in on a four-hour film about Elon Musk, whether or not they’ve actually finished watching it themselves.
I read up properly beforehand so I could at least hold my own in the conversation once I inevitably got pulled into one, which I did, twice, before I’d even finished my coffee: the poster feud writeup gives the full picture, and honestly it’s more entertaining than most of the warehouse parties I’ve covered this month, several of which have leaned so heavily into ironic detachment that genuine entertainment value has become an afterthought.
What I’ve noticed, covering this particular corner of London for as long as I have, is how quickly Shoreditch metabolises any cultural moment into its own peculiar dialect, discussed through the same mix of genuine engagement and performed irony that characterises basically everything round here. The documentary’s already been referenced in at least one gallery opening’s press release this week, entirely unprompted, apparently as a kind of shorthand for the exhibition’s own themes about wealth and visibility.
The poster campaign has its own local following too, arguably a bigger one than the film itself has managed to attract in this specific postcode. The documentary’s box office debate was pinned up, unofficially, in at least one gallery space round here already, repurposed as a kind of found-art commentary on celebrity and marketing, which is a very Shoreditch thing to do with a film poster.
I spent part of the afternoon at a co-working space nearby, and the documentary came up there too, discussed by a table of startup founders with the same intensity they’d normally reserve for a funding round, which felt like genuinely useful evidence of just how far this particular cultural moment has spread across the neighbourhood’s various subcultures.
One founder even asked if I’d write it up properly for the local paper, insisting it said something meaningful about the neighbourhood’s relationship to wealth and visibility, which is possibly overselling a documentary poster pinned to a gallery wall, but I appreciated the enthusiasm regardless, and it’s certainly given me more to write about than the usual brunch queue complaints.
More Shoreditch diary at my author page.