Filmed over four years, The Street documents the `hyper-gentrification“ of Hoxton Street in east London, where locals depend on soup kitchens, £2m penthouses are for sale and you can wash down pie-and-mash with a craft beerThe pie-and-mash shop proprietor gazes out of his window at the craft beer store across the road. Outside the art gallery opening, a soup kitchen serves meals to locals in need. Billboards advertise new luxury apartments with concierge and gym while an old man beds down for the night under the footbridge. The baker closes after 150 years, while a media startup suggests sitting in a bathtub full of coloured balls to improve creativity.The Street is a new documentary that captures the textbook contrasts of the shabby old East End and the new influx of hipsters, property speculators and entrepreneurs in the area. Filmed over four years in a single location - Hoxton Street in Hackney, a stone“s throw from Shoreditch - the film reflects a much wider picture. It is not just about gentrification, but all that feeds into it: history, economics, politics, urbanisation, immigration - how changes in national policy register on the human scale, decades later. It is Brexit Britain in microcosm. Continue reading...
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