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London is often described as a collection of distinct urban villages rather than a single sprawling metropolis, due to the way it developed over time. Discover each neighbourhood's unique character and charm.
Where English theatre started, then furniture, then artists, then start-ups: a district that keeps being reinvented.
The first purpose-built playhouse in England went up here in 1576, outside the City walls where the authorities could not close it. It was called simply the Theatre, and Shakespeare acted in it; when the lease ran out in 1598 the company dismantled it overnight, carried the timbers across the river and used them to build the Globe. The Curtain stood a few streets away, and Romeo and Juliet was probably first performed in it. Afterwards Shoreditch made things. Huguenot silk weavers worked here, then furniture makers in the nineteenth century, so many of them that the trade has its own museum on Kingsland Road, in almshouses of 1714. The bombing and the collapse of manufacturing emptied it, and cheap space brought artists in the 1990s: Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and the rest were showing in warehouses here before the galleries wanted them. The technology companies followed to the roundabout at Old Street, which acquired the nickname Silicon Roundabout, and the bars and restaurants followed the salaries. What that leaves is a district with layers you can see in an hour's walk: St Leonard's, the church of the actors, with a Victorian town hall opposite; Redchurch Street's shops; Boxpark's stacked shipping containers; and, on almost every gable end, some of the best painted walls in Europe.