From artist studios to TikTok skits, the East London creative has become a caricature – but where does identity end and irony begin, and who still gets to call it home?
After an hour of doomscrolling through TikTok, I got curious — hoping to find some “inspiration”, I typed in East London creative. I suppose I’ve joined that club myself. I’ve heard the phrase thrown around in both positive and negative ways, so I wanted to see what everyone else thought (well, everyone on TikTok, really). What I found were skits, POVs, and impersonations — all poking fun at my latest identity crisis. They mocked job titles, spending habits, character traits, and even people’s niche small-plate orders. But why do people hate the idea of an East London creative? When did it come to stand for inauthenticity, unoriginality, and sameness? It feels like you now have to fit into a certain mold — with the right income, connections, and postcode — just to be seen as “creative.”
It wasn’t always this way. Once, East London symbolised a new age of creativity — affordable, accessible, and diverse. Now, it’s become a performance, a character people play in skits and self-aware TikToks. But is there any truth to these caricatures? I started thinking back to my own experiences growing up in East London as a British-Pakistani Muslim woman. It’s hard to ignore how conversations about rent, bills, and the cost of living dominate everyday life. In Walthamstow, where I’ve lived all my life, the feeling of being priced out, from small-plate restaurants to entire neighbourhoods, is impossible to shake.
In the past few years, those who’ve lived in the East End for generations are leaving for cheaper areas outside London. They’re replaced by affluent professionals — often young, white-collar workers in tech, media, or finance — and cultural consumers drawn to the image of the area rather than its community. Developers and investors follow, buying up old factories and warehouses, converting them into “artist-style” luxury flats with exposed brick and industrial windows. The numbers speak for themselves: Hackney’s median house price has risen from £190,000 in 2005 to over £700,000 in 2023 (ONS). In 2021, The Guardian reported that over 60% of new developments in some East London boroughs were sold overseas.
East London’s creative identity has become increasingly commodified through gentrification, and this shift has reshaped local communities, including my own. Social media now plays a major role in defining what it means to be “creative” in a city built more for consumption than creation.
Though the origins of the “East London creative” are complex, a common understanding is that low rents initially attracted artists and designers to the area. In the 1990s, neighbourhoods like Hoxton became hubs for young artists drawn to cheap, spacious warehouse studios. As Andrew Harris notes in Pursuing the Urban Pastoral in Hoxton, London, the area’s industrial decline left behind large, affordable spaces that offered artists both freedom and visibility. Hoxton, once disconnected from London’s traditional art centres in the West End, provided an opportunity for creatives to forge new identities as alternative cultural producers.
Over time, this early wave of artists helped transform East London into a desirable cultural brand. The rise of the “Young British Artists” (YBAs) in the 1990s and early 2000s — many of whom started in Hoxton and Shoreditch — boosted the area’s reputation and, eventually, contributed to its gentrification. Three decades later, most of those artists have long left the East End, priced out by the very success they helped create. Today, young artists can rarely afford to live or work in these neighbourhoods, often relocating abroad to cities like Lisbon or Leipzig (Carty, 2024). The irony is striking: the creative energy that once defined East London has now become both a symbol and a victim of its own commodification.
What was once an authentic, gritty creative scene has gradually been repackaged into a marketable aesthetic. Cafes, restaurants and property developers now lean heavily on the “East London creative” brand, turning the area into an aspirational and expensive locale. Shoreditch, once the beating heart of London’s music, clubbing and YBA art scene, now hosts blue-chip galleries and high-end apartments. The spaces that once gave the neighbourhood its charisma and sense of community have been largely priced out, replaced by culinary hotspots and Instagram-ready interiors.
My most recent wander through Hackney Central exemplified the need for locals to adapt to this new meaning of creativity to stay in the game, most notable in Atlantis Records. Speaking with the owner, I learned it had begun as a coffee shop but rising rents and the boom in cafe culture forced a pivot. Now, it’s a conversation-starting vinyl store. But the difference between this rebrand and the soulless, minimalist moulds of creativity that seem to tick every social media trend is its community building. The way they give back to the local music scene and let people stay as long as they please without the pressure of buying anything is what makes it a perfect third space for all.
As physical creative space disappears under rising costs, social media has become the new studio. But the same forces of branding and visibility that shape the streets also shape our screens: creativity that must be polished, marketable, and algorithm-friendly. The East London creative of the future may not need a studio at all, but without an affordable, accessible place, can creativity still belong to a community? Perhaps the future of East London’s creativity won’t be found in the next pop-up gallery or Instagrammable cafe , but in small, local acts of resistance — people who make, share and collaborate despite the pressures of rising costs and algorithms. Maybe the most authentic creativity is no longer found in the trendiest postcodes, but in the quiet persistence of those still creating for connection, not consumption.