Uniformity—not money—is ruining London

Earlier this February, Mast Brothers, a new luxury chocolatier, opened on Redchurch Street in Shoreditch, East London. The shop looks like a cross between an Apple Store and a craft brewery. It is the definition of minimal: concrete floors, plate glass windows and elegantly packaged goods laid out on blonde wood tables. And at the back, big stainless steel vats produce chocolate bars with extravagant names like Stumptown Coffee and Vanilla and Smoke. To make a purchase is to “celebrate... the delicious work of food artisans.” But doing so comes at a price. A bar of Cacao Nib or Brooklyn Blend costs £8 or you can really “celebrate” with a boxed set of a dozen bars at £85.

This might seem expensive for a shop in Tower Hamlets, an east London borough which is the capital's third most deprived. But then Redchurch Street—a terraced row of sometime warehouses near Shoreditch's lively Brick Lane—has long been the frontline in the ongoing gentrification of this part of the city. The artists Tim Noble and Sue Webster built a house designed by the award-winning architect David Adjaye there in the 90s. Shoreditch House opened around the corner in 2007. And today, with chic fashion retailers like French brand APC (Atelier de Production et de Creation), New York label Club Monaco and cosmetics store Aesop lining the road, this stretch has been hailed by the Financial Times as “the Bond Street of East London.”

It’s easy to see this artisan chocolate shop as the latest example of high prices making it harder for ordinary people to live, work, party or just buy reasonably priced confectionary in the capital—just think of the row over the opening of a “cereal cafe” on Brick Lane itself last year. In austerity Britain, the chocolate shop's opening stings as much as stories of ghost mansions in Kensington and Knightsbridge left empty by wealthy overseas investors, or the scores of mechanical diggers left buried by construction companies under new mega-basements in Holland Park and Chelsea, because the excavations are so deep it’s no longer cost effective to retrieve them after work is completed.

Is money ruining London? Based on such stories, the answer would seem to be a loud yes. All the more so when you consider the yawning inequalities in the city. The gap between London’s rich and poor is at its most extreme in 200 years—the top 10 per cent have an average wealth of around £900,000, or 273 times the amount of the lowest 10 per cent (who have about £3,500.) That's a wealth gap significantly bigger than comparable cities like New York and Tokyo. Life expectancy drops by about seven years from Kensington and Chelsea in the west to Tower Hamlets in the East.

But, cities aren’t fixed propositions, perfect one moment, despoiled in another. As a consequence of movements of trade, capital and people, they are always in a state of flux. It’s hard to picture any period in London’s history when it was an Arcadian idyll of opportunity for all. You could go back to the 1960s say, when properties were cheap and the current generation of pensioners bought their family homes for a song. But examples of exclusion and inequality were still rife then, as any immigrant from the Caribbean, or in my parents’ case Ghana, that had doors slammed in their faces and landlords that refused to rent to them as a consequence of the colour of their skin, will tell you.

It’s not money per se that’s the problem for London—who would want to live in a city that people didn’t want to travel to or do business in?—but rather how that money is spent and what its impact is on the culture and values of the city. It’s a question of taste.

In Finsbury Park, a North London suburb where I live, property price inflation means a three bedroom terraced house now costs around £1m. Most of my neighbours are lawyers or bankers who’ve moved to the area because they can’t afford to buy down the road in the more gentrified area of Highbury. In their wake, delis selling flat whites and goats cheese and olive tapenade on sourdough bread are spreading along Stroud Green Road, a thoroughfare whose shabbiness has always been offset by the beguiling diversity of its retailers, from Algerian barbers and Mauritian fish restaurants to Turkish tailors, African hairdressers and Chinese herbalists.

But the consequence of gentrification is a flattening of perspective in which distinctiveness is erased by the generic and predictable. Over time, a place that was ragged, idiosyncratic and unique becomes another bland middle class enclave full of coffee shops and designer baby clothes stores.

For a city like London that’s a tragedy. The capital’s greatest strength is its diversity: eight and a half million people with radically contrasting personal stories crammed together in a finite space.

What I treasure about London is that it’s a city where difference is celebrated not feared. You can hear that in its music; in the way that grime pioneers like Dizzee Rascal, Wiley and Kano created a distinctive sound out of the melange of influences around them in East London, from drum ‘n’ bass, dancehall reggae and hip-hop to the speech patterns and slang of their West Indian, African and Asian-originated peers.

Or in the promiscuity of reference that London-based visual artists such as Yinka Shonibare—who creates mannequins, ships and other sculptures—and Hew Locke—fond of found objects and collage—bring to their work: merging narratives of race, history, globalisation, Britain’s colonial past and its hybrid present into dazzling works of beauty and sophistication.

This polyglot sensibility, this openness and inquisitiveness about the lives of others pressed into the service of making art, is one of the defining characteristics of London’s cultural identity. It’s what makes it one of the great creative cities of the world.

But as neighbourhoods like Finsbury Park become increasingly homogenous, as Shoreditch turns into a hipster version of wealthy, stale Kensington and Chelsea, my fear is that London is losing what makes it special. It’s true that change is inevitable in any city. But sometimes, like an £8 chocolate bar, it leaves a bad taste in the mouth.