[sk00byd00]

Fascinating. I find it especially interesting to see the results of gentrification. As someone who watched a million Nathan Barleys take over Shoreditch in the mid to late 00's until the artists left, it is absolutely amazing to see the average salary of Tower Hamlets is now £3400.

Where did all those poor people go?

[kryten]

I left when they turned up as well and I'm no artist. There was a reasonable tech community around there before it went all trendy as most of us found it pretty cheap and convenient whilst raping the corporations around E1/Docklands as hard as we could on contract work (TBH they deserved it :)

Poor people are still there, stacked up on top of each other in the estates around the top of City Road and around the focal point of Shoreditch.

It's still like Islington (where I was born into abject poverty without even the prospect of an orange lined fluffy anorak or dunlops) in the 1970's around the back of Shoreditch. Total deprivation, but people are getting by somehow, without an iPhone or a power-job. Good luck to them but fuck the hipsters to hell.

[contingencies]

...the hipsters to hell.

Back in ~2009, living on the southern periphery in Whitechapel, we came up with the idea to call 'em ditchies.

There's a decent old-school pub left with some serious artists (aged and incoming) directly opposite the East London Mosque. It's run by an alcoholic former schoolteacher who reckoned it was better public service running a bar (apparently, for artists). Good place.

[muyuu]

I live in Tower Hamlets and I have a hard time believing that figure. I guess there are plenty of super-rich in West India Quay, Canary Wharf and Pan Peninsula.

The median salary is probably around 1/3 of that.

[sjtgraham]

It's the average salary, which can skewed by a handful of extreme outliers.

[sk00byd00]

Yes I understand that. What I was suggesting is that the poor people in Tower Hamlets haven't all been displaced, just the people in the Shoreditch triangle, which is tiny in population when you compare to say, Bow, just next door.

So the amount of money brought in from the Shoreditch gentrification and subsequent business tax breaks leading up to the Olympics was so great in that one concentrated area that the ENTIRE Tower Hamlets looks decent statistically but the reality is very different.

[freyfogle]

Shoreditch Triangle is in Hackney, not Tower Hamlets. The divide is midway down Redchurch Street, I know as I used to live there and Tower Hamlets would manage to send us our council tax bill but then provide no services. Fun times.