Shoreditch

Shoreditch appears in written records around 1148, in the form Soredich, in a charter documenting property just north of London's old Roman wall. The name is Old English: scora, meaning a steep bank or slope, combined with dic, meaning a ditch or dyke. The ditch in question was a real drainage channel running along the embankment east of Bishopsgate, carrying surface water away from the settled ground within the city walls. No mystery, no romance: it was a ditch beside a bank.

The folk etymology connecting the name to Jane Shore, mistress of Edward IV, who is said to have died destitute in a ditch nearby, fails on chronology alone. The name Soredich predates Jane Shore's death (around 1527) by nearly four centuries. The story was already circulating by 1598, when John Stow included it cautiously in his Survey of London, and it proved irresistible because it sounds like a morality tale. Good stories tend to displace accurate ones.

What Shoreditch actually became is far more interesting than any legend about a ruined woman. In 1576, James Burbage built The Theatre on Holywell Lane in Shoreditch, the first permanent public playhouse in England. Shakespeare's company performed there before moving south to the Globe in Southwark. The area outside the city walls was chosen deliberately: it lay beyond the jurisdiction of the City of London's authorities, who viewed professional theatre with suspicion.

The same logic that brought Elizabethan theatre outside the walls would eventually bring textile workshops, furniture makers, and in the late twentieth century, artists and technology companies. The cheap rent at the city's edge, the density of old industrial buildings, and the slight sense of operating outside conventional London made Shoreditch what it remained through every reinvention. The postcode EC2A and the street Shoreditch High Street now appear in company addresses across Europe. A drainage ditch became a cultural brand.