Architects Shoreditch

Shoreditch has come a long way. Londoners of a certain age will remember a post war community deserted by families, neglected by investment and left to flounder… if they remember it all. After artists discovered its abandoned industrial spaces and charming Georgian streetscapes in the 1980s and ’90s, it began a renaissance and hasn’t stopped improving. Artists brought in art-lovers, and bars and clubs to support them. As nightlife overflowed into daytime, the creative industries set up shop, and networks of world-class restaurants and boutiques linked everything together. With work and leisure becoming less distinct, Shoreditch has emerged as a place where anything goes. The arrival of the super-clean, super-punctual Overground system, running through Shoreditch High Street Station, cemented the area’s status as a major London hub. And local architects well versed in taking a heritage home sympathetically into the 21st century have made it a decidedly liveable one.

But a lot of people don’t know truly how far Shoreditch has come. Nearly 2,000 years ago the Romans dug a great highway north from the River Thames – the same route that now calls itself Shoreditch High Street. The territory sitting just outside the old city walls served first as a Roman burial ground and then as a suburb, where tradesmen set up workshops to supply the population with its furniture, equipment and horseshoes. As residents branched outward from the old city in the Middle Ages – families, immigrants, outcasts and aristocrats demanding more space – they built magnificent churches and priories like St Leonard’s to support the community. After King Henry VIII ordered the monasteries dismantled, an impresario called James Burbage built a theatre called, appropriately, The Theatre, using stone and wood from the demolition of Holywell Priory. The Theatre employed William Shakespeare first as an actor and after as a playwright.

The built landscape as we know it today began to form in the 18th century, when some 25,000 Huguenots fled France for refuge around Spitalfields, near the French Protestant churches on Brick Lane and Artillery Lane. With proceeds from silk-weaving and silversmithing, they built distinguished brick townhouses flanking cobblestone roads. And they used that same 2,000-year-old road to carry their wares north to sell.

Though a few of those houses have opened to the public as museums – Dennis Severs’ House on Folgate Street is a national treasure – those surviving Huguenots homes sell for millions today. Yet the architecture of intervening years is more varied and attainable. Victorian factories and warehouses have become loft complexes; almshouses have evolved into apartment buildings; early housing estates have aged well, becoming desirable pieds-à-terre. New architecture abounds in the spaces between, or in voids left by bombing raids during the Second World War – the benefit of living here is your view will be almost exclusively vintage.
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Shoreditch is one of the oldest inhabitable areas in the city, even if the name conjures images of hipsters holding pints on street corners. But living here requires responsibility to the architectural fabric. A Shoreditch architect well fluent in historic London buildings and conservation regulations will ease your transition into this rich cultural centre – allowing you not only to benefit from it but contribute to it, too.