One Sunday in July 1998, the photographer Pete Williams ushered a little over 100 people into the cobbled streets of Hoxton Square, uncovered the lens cap on his 8x10 plate camera and shot a black-and-white image of the group.

The shoot had been arranged by Paul Bradshaw, founder of Straight No Chaser, a music magazine based in the neighbourhood, both to mark the publication’s 10th anniversary and as a tribute to Art Kane’s famous 1958 group portrait of New York jazz players, A Great Day in Harlem.

However, Williams’ photo – which he called A Great Day in Hoxton – didn’t just feature musicians. Alongside prominent music-biz faces such as Gilles Peterson and James Lavelle were many talented designers, fashion professionals, writers, dancers and fellow photographers.



A Great Day in Hoxton, 1998. Photograph: Peter Williams

“I knew I was capturing something that might be interesting in future,” he recalls. “We didn’t have to close any roads. It was all improvised. You’d probably need an act of parliament to close that road now.”

Indeed, visit Hoxton Square today and you’ll see almost no resemblance to the one in the photo. Instead of scruffy musicians and artists, it’s full of young professionals wearing office-ID lanyards around their necks. In 2016, the property firm Knight Frank reported that Shoreditch’s office rents had risen by 24% the previous year, and by 2017 Shoreditch had become the world’s most expensive tech and creative district, with rents averaging £64.60 ($90.75) per sq ft – higher than the Mid-Market district of San Francisco and almost double those in an equivalent area of Brooklyn.

I think we [Aviva] own about half Hoxton Square now. Mark Wilson, Aviva CEO

But nothing quite encapsulates the gap between that 1998 photo and the reality 20 years on than the company that has quietly, not to say secretly, become the single biggest landlord on the square.

Over the past three years, a firm called Percussion Properties has bought a series of buildings to establish at least four office sites in or near Hoxton Square, including one building on the south-east corner on which it splashed £8.5m. The wider plan, according to planning submissions, is to create “a campus of refurbished buildings in this vibrant and diverse London district”.

Percussion Properties is owned by Aviva, one of the UK’s largest insurance companies. In November 2016, Mark Wilson, the CEO of Aviva, told a marketing trade magazine: “I think we [Aviva] own about half Hoxton Square now.”

On the up … Hoxton Square in 1997. Photograph: ANL/Rex/Shutterstock

How exactly a city goes from avant garde to Aviva in 20 years is not exactly a unique story – it is mirrored in other cities across the world, from Barcelona’s El Poblenou district to Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg – but there is perhaps no better place to find out than here in these four cobbled streets, which seem to epitomise global gentrification.

Hoxton Square was built as a genteel residential development in the early 18th century, but by the early 1980s this rectangle of low-rise residential buildings, workshops and warehouses had fallen into disrepair.



“The area was very rough – someone was murdered around the corner, cars were regularly burgled,” recalls the 89-year-old jazz bassist Peter Ind, who in 1984 opened a club, the Bass Clef, on the square. “I was not daunted – I had the memories of the various clubs in New York City when I lived there in the 50s. Many were very modest if not rough, too.”

Hoxton Square in October 1970: parking meters stand amid piles of rubbish, accumulated because of a strike by council binmen. Photograph: Leonard Burt/Getty Images

The artists had already started arriving in dribs and drabs. In 1988, Gary Hume and Sarah Lucas (both of whom would go on to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale) squatted a disused plumbing depot in the square’s north-west corner. In November of that year, the rare-groove DJ Norman Jay began promoting a night at Ind’s Bass Clef, drawing listeners to his show on Kiss FM, then still a pirate radio station. A few years after that, Alexander McQueen also took up residence in the square.

But art world commentators tend to date Hoxton’s rise to 1993, when the 22-year-old gallerist Joshua Compston staged his inaugural Fete Worse Than Death, a pastiche of a village fair. At the first of these, Damien Hirst dressed as a clown and charged attendees £1 to make a spin painting and 50p to take look at his penis, which had been painted colourfully for the occasion.

“It was mad – wild,” says Ingrid Swenson, director of the Peer gallery on Hoxton Street. “‘No, Damien,’” she recalls saying, “‘you’re not having 50p off me. Put your willy away.’”

Damien Hirst (left) and Angus Fairhurst dressed as clowns at 1993’s Fete Worse Than Death. Photo: Alamy

The newfound prominence of the square attracted crowds from across the city. Jay Jopling had opened his first art gallery, White Cube, in St James that year, but represented Hirst and Tracey Emin and found himself spending more time in east London.



“Many of the artists I was interested in seemed to have studio space there,” he says. “It reminded me of my first trips to Manhattan’s Lower East Side in the mid-80s. It was gritty and raw, but somehow imbued with a very real sense of potential.”

When Eddie Piller, founder of the Acid Jazz record label, bought the Bass Clef for £300,000 in 1993 and turned it into a multi-purpose arts venue and nightclub, the Blue Note, it drew in everyone from David Bowie and Björk through to Lauryn Hill and Kate Moss. In 2000, Jopling opened another gallery on Hoxton Square, and a myriad of smaller recording studios, design ateliers and production companies flourished, drawn by both the cheap rents and laissez-faire atmosphere.

As Hoxton Square’s star rose throughout the noughties, it attracted another kind of attention too. On 4 November 2010, the prime minster, David Cameron, announced plans to transform London’s East End into a technology incubator to rival Silicon Valley. In his speech, Cameron envisioned “a hub that stretches from Shoreditch and Old Street to the Olympic Park”, and quoted the urbanist Richard Florida, who argued that young creative people would “cluster” in areas with a high quality of life and cultural vibrancy.

Restaurant chains began to move in: Byron Burger took up a spot on the square’s south-east corner in 2011, paying £120,000 a year in rent (40% of the amount Piller and co paid to buy the entire Blue Note), and Bill’s – owned by former BHS stakeholder and restaurant tycoon Richard Caring – opened on the square’s south-west in 2013, in the Bass Clef’s old building.

By the time the 2012 Olympic Games began in London, Hoxton no longer seemed like an artsy, low-rent neighbourhood, but a startup technology community.



Jay Jopling in 1999 outside the building that would become the White Cube gallery. Photograph: John Voos/The Independent/Rex/Shutterstock

One of the companies that moved into neighbouring Hoxton Street in 2012 was Movement, a mobile phone ad agency. Mark Freeman, co-founder and creative director, says he and his colleagues appreciate the area’s lively mix of small business, though he recognises the neighbourhood has changed: “Hoxton Square isn’t what it was in the noughties. This patch of east London lost its edge a long time ago.”

By 2014, the music and events producer Elliott Jack, who first began working in the square in 2002, discovered this newfound activity was placing unsustainable pressure on his little bit of office space. “When I left Hoxton, it was full of tech startups and they were driving the rents up so much,” says Jack. “Our landlord said he was going to sell the building, asked us to leave, but he kicked everyone out, renovated it, doubled the rents and got loads of tech people in.”

It’s a common story. Knight Frank reports that, despite the Brexit vote, east London landlords can expect their office incomes to rise by another 11.4% over the next three years, as tech money continues to flood in from established giants such as Facebook and newer entrants in the fields of artificial intelligence and life sciences.

They’re trying to make themselves not seem like a large corporate entity Nick Perry, Hackney Society

Hoxton also services some of the needs of Europe’s largest financial centre, the City of London, which lies just to its south – hence Aviva’s interest. Its CEO was exaggerating when he said the company owns half the square, but not by much. Since 2014, through its Percussion front, Aviva has bought 28-30 Hoxton Square and 31-37 Hoxton Street on the north-east corner, 43-44 Hoxton Square, the £8.5m office building on the south-east corner, another warehouse building with planning permission for offices on nearby Coronet Street, and 33-35 Hoxton Street, in the middle of the square’s eastern edge, which is the first of the buildings to be completed and occupied: it now houses a startup incubator for Aviva staff and a few independent firms. Aviva calls it the Digital Garage, and it’s the first step in the company’s plan to build a corporate technology campus similar to Amazon’s hub in Seattle or Google’s acquisitions in Chelsea in New York City.

Yet it isn’t just the number buildings Aviva has managed to buy, or the way it has bought them, that worries some of the square’s residents.

“They’re trying to make themselves not seem like a large corporate entity,” says Nick Perry from the Hackney Society, a local neighbourhood-rights association. “Yet they’re taking over large swathes of Hoxton Square, the grain of which is very small.” Perry argues that, by establishing so great a presence, Aviva may disturb the very working environment they aim to join. “It’s going to change the area, because it’s the antithesis of the area.”

Tracey Emin at the White Cube gallery in 2001, opening her exhibition You Forgot to Kiss My Soul. Photograph: Johnny Green/PA

These concerns are echoed by others in the square. “Hoxton Square was already changing when we moved here 10 years ago, but the idea of buying up a number of buildings to create a monoculture obviously has an effect on the diversity of a neighbourhood,” says Dave Bell, creative partner at the independent communications agency KesselsKramer. “Small creative independent companies are moving out – including ourselves – and corporations and fast food chains are moving in. The City is encroaching upon the community and the neighbourhood, stifling what they probably found interesting in the first place.”

Andrew Brem, Aviva’s chief digital officer, disputes this. He highlights the new office’s diversity, both in terms of professions – the Digital Garage has film-makers, user-experience designers, editors, data scientists and software engineers – and backgrounds: there are 18-20 different nationalities represented among the firm’s Hoxton cohort. He says Aviva needs this sort of plurality to meet the technological challenges of 2018. “We can attract people here who simply won’t work down the road,” he says. “That’s totally been borne out; developers and designers don’t want to work in tower blocks.”

Whether those developers and designers will innovate as freely in a square with one large and prominent employer is unclear; and their arrival hasn’t left Hoxton Square unaltered either. The acclaimed Norwegian photographer Sølve Sundsbø has kept a studio on Mundy Street, on the north-east edge, for around two decades, during which time he has shot for Vogue, produced campaign images for Yves Saint Laurent, Louis Vuitton and Hermes, and created the cover image on Coldplay’s 2002 album A Rush of Blood to the Head.

In the coming months, part of Aviva’s new campus will rise up and block out light to Sundsbø’s studio from the south. He has lodged protests, but to no avail. Sundsbø feels Aviva have been somewhat stealthy in the way they’ve insinuated themselves into the square, though he recognises their arrival is part of a larger trend.

‘You’d need an act of parliament to close the road now’ … Bill’s on Hoxton Square today. Photograph: Alamy

“It’s not a one-off,” he says. “This whole part of town has changed over 20 years.”

Many other old faces have moved on. Hirst has homes in Gloucestershire and beside Regent’s Park; Sarah Lucas lives in Benjamin Britten’s old house in Suffolk; photographer Pete Williams now spends a great deal more time in Hay-on-Wye; both Alexander McQueen and Joshua Compston have died.

Despite this Sundsbø is staying, and he remains relatively sanguine. He says he might try to build something on top of his place, to chase that southern light, before acknowledging, as most east London professionals do, that this part of the British capital has undergone many other alterations – “constantly, since the Huguenots”.

“I’m not lamenting it,” says Sundsbø, with a wry note in his voice. “It’s sad. Inevitable, but sad. OK, it’s always been a part of London that has been in constant change, but I think this might be the final chapter.”

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