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Artist News
Andrew Weatherall forced out of Shoreditch studio
By Andy Malt | Published on Friday 23 October 2015
Producer Andrew Weatherall has been forced to leave his Scrutton Street Studios in Shoreditch as the gentrification of East London rages on.
He tells Ransom Note: “Grayson Perry in his Reith Lectures of 2013 described artists and musicians as the shock troops of gentrification. The first wave that sanitises the battlefield and prepares the ground for the officer classes. I’ve had a studio in Shoreditch for 20 years but I’ve just been given my marching orders due to what I’ve been told is ‘redevelopment’. My services are no longer required”.
“To be honest with you, other people seem to be getting annoyed on my behalf”, he continues. “Deep down I knew about seven or eight years ago that my time was most probably up: it was the Saturday afternoon I saw the stretch limo disgorge its hen party payload onto the Old Street pavement. But down in my bunker, denial was beginning to set in, and I felt increasingly like a jungle-dwelling Japanese soldier who refuses to believe the war is over”.
Although unwilling to say exactly where he’s now moved on to, he explained that it was “another battlefield wasteland – run down factories, giant broken extractor fans now the homes for oil slick pigeons”.
Have a look at the old studios, as they were, here. And if you find yourself getting angry that this space is now being all gentrified up by some tedious property twonk, apparently you’re meant to voice your protest by throwing a brick at someone eating Cornflakes.
