‘Tech City’ was first uttered by David Cameron in a speech on 4 November 2010, five years ago this week, as an attempt “to rival Silicon Valley”. In issue one of Tech City News, Charles Armstrong, founder of The Trampery, told us how it actually all started way back in 1994…
East London is constantly changing. That’s how it’s been for more than a thousand years. Waves of immigration and industrial change have shaped a constant process of assimilation and adaptation. The genius of Shoreditch’s creative economy and the surrounding “Tech City” cluster is that it feels like it’s just happened, something still in a flurry of construction. That’s part of what underpins its aura of possibility and freedom. It’s not built yet, there’s still time to change the design.
But actually the foundations of today’s tech and creative cluster were laid more than thirty years ago. The story of the artists moving to Shoreditch in the 1980s searching for cheap studio space is already well known. Less widely recognised is the role technology businesses played in Shoreditch decades before the current boom.
My very first visit to Shoreditch was in 1994, just a year out of university. I didn’t come for an art show or a rave. I came to visit a software venture called Direct Image which, like so many of today’s startups, was setting out to disrupt an established industry. It was my first experience of technology business and it made a great impression. The business was based on Baches Street on a site shortly destined to be demolished to build student accommodation.
The founders of Direct Image had foreseen that digital printing would inevitably shift the printing industry towards just-in-time printing, short print runs and new models of data-driven publishing – the very trends which would create Moo a decade later. My university friend Craig McMillan had been hired as a software engineer to work on a platform automating production of an annual almanac for the oil industry.
In the past each year’s publication had been laboriously compiled by researchers and designers. Now Direct Image could lay out each page from a digital template, populate it from a database of oil industry statistics and send the document whizzing off to a digital press. Clients were willing to pay an astronomical price for the almanac so slashing its production cost was a profitable innovation.
Direct Image was a spinout from an established printing business. Printing was one of Shoreditch’s principal industries through the post-war period. Firms could find large spaces for their presses at a low cost and were conveniently close to clients in the City.
In many ways the printing industry laid the foundations of the modern cluster. A lot of printing firms shut up shop during the 1980s but those that remained were among the first adopters of desktop computers. The new technology was used by pre-press departments to speed up page design and type-setting. These businesses brought the first computer-based graphic designers and software engineers to Shoreditch in the late 1980s. Many of them stayed to set up web agencies and design studios in the 1990s.
By the time of my first visit in 1994 Shoreditch was already more than a decade into its evolution as a creative district. The first artists had started moving into abandoned printing works and warehouses in the early 1980s. In 1984 Richard Boote opened The Strongrooms recording studios off Curtain Road (where it remains). He pioneered a model for a community-based creative facility twenty-five years before The Trampery opened Shoreditch’s first shared workspace in 2009.
The Blue Note opened on the corner of Hoxton Square in 1993 combining a bar, an art gallery and performance space. It provided a focal point for the arts community and became the prototype for almost every Shoreditch venue that followed. A lot of music and art events were happening in the area by the mid 1990s and for the first time people were starting to travel from all over London to see them.
I remember coming to a hip hop and street art event in Hoxton Square in 1996. My friend BO130 was painting panels with a group of graffiti artists in what was then a derelict yard to the west of the square (now luxury apartments). DJ Food was playing in a shed in the middle of the square.
Shoreditch hosted London’s dot com boom in the late 1990s. My friend Will Richard was part of the team that founded a web agency called Bomb in 1998. They had a studio on Curtain Road, the central axis for the area’s web businesses. Another friend Tom Perrett was working as a digital animator in an office upstairs from the old Foundry (my favourite Shoreditch bar until it was closed by property developers).
For a few years Shoreditch was awash with weird and wonderful web businesses. At the same time Shoreditch was seized on by the global fashion industry as a hotspot for extreme street styles. Everyone you met either had a business plan tucked in their pocket or some kind of children’s toy as a hat. This was the era of Nathan Barley. A weekly email newsletter called NTK (Need to Know) captured the spirit of London’s tech industry of that era perfectly. The writers were concerned in equal measure with technology, civil rights and new flavours of biscuits.
In 2001 I finally came to live in Shoreditch. Along with a Basque designer I rented a fl at in one of the grand 1880s council blocks around Arnold Circus. We were the first non-Bangladeshi tenants to live in the building for a generation. I was spending a lot of time with Michael Young, then in his late 80s, who was working on his epic social history of Bethnal Green. I contributed a section on the “new immigrants”, young creative professionals like myself who were displacing the previous inhabitants of East London. My stay at Arnold Circus was only six months; sandwiched between periods in the Isles of Scilly, Ghana and the Aeolian Islands. But it was a fascinating period to be there, with rapid changes on every side.
In the wake of the dot com implosion the web businesses were disappearing as swiftly as they’d appeared. The artists too had mostly gone, driven further East by rapidly rising rents. The dilapidated warehouses were being refurbished and sold to creative and financial sector professionals drawn by the burgeoning nightlife and the possibility of walking to work. 2001 was the year I first heard people complain that Shoreditch was going to the dogs and losing its village atmosphere. But it was a lot of fun to be there.
Two years later in 2003 I came back to Shoreditch to set up a software business (Trampoline Systems) with Craig McMillan, the same friend I’d visited at Direct Image all those years before. We chose Shoreditch as our base because just about everyone you spoke to was trying to create something new and we felt the interplay of ideas from different sectors would be a great stimulus for innovation. Enough technology businesses made similar choices that by 2008 the concentration of software and web startups became an attractor in its own right. That’s when the stampede really began.
The process of evolution I’ve traced out didn’t happen in a vacuum. From the 1990s onwards there were already people at Hackney Council who saw Shoreditch’s potential as a creative nexus and sought to nudge it towards that goal. Since 2010 the involvement of central government has made a huge impact developing an international profile and attracting large technology fi rms to the area for the first time. But at its heart the Shoreditch cluster is an emergent phenomenon born of the choices and accidents of a thousand people. If the area hadn’t been picked by the post-war printing industry and artists of the 1980s there would be no Tech City today.