{"id":1584,"date":"2023-10-13T22:35:01","date_gmt":"2023-10-13T22:35:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/infundpros.com\/business\/how-hackney-became-a-diamond\/"},"modified":"2023-10-13T22:35:01","modified_gmt":"2023-10-13T22:35:01","slug":"how-hackney-became-a-diamond","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/infundpros.com\/?p=1584","title":{"rendered":"How Hackney became a diamond"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<p>Stay informed with free updates<\/p>\n<p class=\"article__content-sign-up-topic-description\"><span>Simply sign up to the <!-- -->Life &amp; Arts<!-- --> myFT Digest &#8212; delivered directly to your inbox.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><iframe class=\"article__content-sign-up-iframe close\" scrolling=\"no\" id=\"signUpIframe\" data-prev-url=\"\/register\/in-article-sign-up?ft-content-uuid=ef4fc765-b437-471c-8d2e-7dba3ad0be82&amp;concept-id=0b83bc44-4a55-4958-882e-73ba6b2b0aa6\"><\/iframe><\/div>\n<div id=\"article-body\">\n<p>As a rule of thumb, if I like a neighbourhood, it peaked a decade earlier. When I lived in Silver Lake, the hipster frontier of Los Angeles had long before moved to the other side of Dodger Stadium. When I did a stint in the Shaw district of Washington, the \u201cscene\u201d \u2014 to the extent that such a thing can exist amid the majestic seriousness of the imperial capital \u2014 had transferred to H Street.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>In fact, as a lagging indicator, I have just two equals. One is Aesop, the Australian cosmetics brand whose arrival in a district tends to round off its transition from avant garde to Bobo. The other, it seems, is The Rolling Stones. In the title and promotion of their album <em>Hackney Diamonds<\/em>, which comes out next week, the band tips a fedora hat to a London borough decades after it became a haunt of the creative class. <\/p>\n<p>Whether you regard it as paradise, or as a beachhead for ruthless gentrifiers, the mutation of Hackney, and its fringes, is up there with Brooklyn and Kreuzberg as an urban story.\u00a0<\/p>\n<figure class=\"n-content-image n-content-image--full\"><picture><source media=\"(min-width: 700px)\"  width=\"2288\" height=\"1526\"><\/source><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/infundpros.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/10\/https:\/\/d1e00ek4ebabms.cloudfront.net\/production\/ecf80759-b4e2-4b45-be50-5aecf0431142.jpg\" alt=\"Keith Richards, Mick Jagger and Ronnie Wood of The Rolling Stones, pictured recently in the back of a limousine\" data-image-type=\"image\" width=\"2288\" height=\"1526\"><\/picture><figcaption class=\"n-content-picture__caption\"><span>The new album from the Rolling Stones, \u2018Hackney Diamonds\u2019, is named after East End slang for broken glass<\/span><span> <!-- -->\u00a9 Mark Seliger<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>It is also rich in lessons. First, that infrastructure, while important, isn\u2019t everything. In fact, it can have perverse consequences. Perhaps the crucial fact about Hackney is that it isn\u2019t on the Tube. (Though its slick overhead trains allow eerily Hitchcockian views into people\u2019s homes.) If it were, and locals could traverse the city on a whim, I doubt the borough could sustain its independent cinemas, its nightlife, its urban farm, or its atmosphere. A little bit of separateness forces a place to evolve its own features, like the Gal\u00e1pagos finches that piqued Darwin\u2019s curiosity. Whatever estate agents say, the only \u201cvillages\u201d in London tend to be off-Tube.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"n-content-pullquote n-content-pullquote--no-image\" aria-hidden=\"true\">\n<div class=\"n-content-pullquote__content\">\n<p>If locals could traverse the city on the Tube, I doubt the borough could sustain its nightlife<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>The same principle can hold across an entire city. The glory of LA is inseparable from its most obvious glitch, which is the lack of geographic integration through public transport. Forced to have their own ecosystems, neighbourhoods there harbour all manner of curiosities: galleries in strip malls, vinyl-playing bars above unpromising chain pizzerias, a restaurant as fine as n\/naka just off Interstate 10.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>The rise (some would say fall) of Hackney has underlined something else. There is a closer relationship between bohemia and capitalism than either side can stand to admit. Notice how often the most modish neighbourhoods lie close to financial districts. It might be that incidental business from high-earners allows creative people \u2014 chefs, artists \u2014 to take risks. Or that both cultures rely in the end on a kind of individualism. A Labour borough, Hackney has entrepreneurial smallholders, whether in the migrant-run markets or the starred restaurants, to make a Thatcherite brush a tear from their cheek.<\/p>\n<p>But perhaps the ultimate lesson of all that has happened in E8 and its surrounding postcodes is how difficult such change is to bring about. The morality of gentrification is debated often enough. Support it, and you seem indifferent to the displacement of people. Fight it, and you can cross over into the sentimentalisation of poverty. Neglected in the crossfire is the technical question of how it happens at all. And lots of struggling places are desperate to know.<\/p>\n<p>Well, for most, Hackney isn\u2019t a viable template. Even aside from being a few miles from the core of Europe\u2019s global city, it had lavish physical assets to work with: the canal, the Victorian brick, the ever-surprising green-ness. Infusing this built environment is the history, whether glorious (Joseph Conrad recovered from maritime illness here) or notorious (\u201cHackney diamonds\u201d is antiquated slang for broken glass, such as might litter a retail premises post-robbery).\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>No place, however desperate it is to improve itself, can magick up this kind of material or atmospheric legacy. This is why, while new developments arouse anger and distaste in some people, in me the feeling is more poignant. It is about the creation of hopes \u2014 of \u201cvillage\u201d life, of caf\u00e9 culture \u2014 that aren\u2019t realistic.\u00a0A place must work within its inheritance.<\/p>\n<p>Having grown up in a suburb that gentrification forgot, I can see that it wasn\u2019t anyone\u2019s fault. The interwar housing there isn\u2019t so coveted or the historical texture so beguiling. That, no doubt, is why I pass more evenings and weekends in Hackney than anywhere else. Of course, the bohemian frontline has long since moved south across the river. See you there in a decade.<\/p>\n<p><em>Email Janan at <\/em><em>janan.ganesh@ft.com<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>Find out about our latest stories first \u2014 follow <\/em><a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/ftweekend?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor\" data-trackable=\"link\"><em>@ftweekend<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><script async src=\"\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><br \/>\n<br \/>Read the full article <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ft.com\/content\/ef4fc765-b437-471c-8d2e-7dba3ad0be82\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">here<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Stay informed with free updates Simply sign up to the Life &amp; Arts myFT Digest &#8212; delivered directly to your inbox. As&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1584","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-business"},"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v21.3 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>How Hackney became a diamond | inFundPros<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Life &amp; Arts myFT Digest -- delivered directly to your inbox.As a rule of thumb, if I like a\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/infundpros.com\/?p=1584\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"How Hackney became a diamond | inFundPros\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Life &amp; 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