Poor people are still there, stacked up on top of each other in the estates around the top of City Road and around the focal point of Shoreditch.

It's still like Islington (where I was born into abject poverty without even the prospect of an orange lined fluffy anorak or dunlops) in the 1970's around the back of Shoreditch. Total deprivation, but people are getting by somehow, without an iPhone or a power-job. Good luck to them but fuck the hipsters to hell.

Back in ~2009, living on the southern periphery in Whitechapel, we came up with the idea to call 'em ditchies.

There's a decent old-school pub left with some serious artists (aged and incoming) directly opposite the East London Mosque. It's run by an alcoholic former schoolteacher who reckoned it was better public service running a bar (apparently, for artists). Good place.

The median salary is probably around 1/3 of that.

So the amount of money brought in from the Shoreditch gentrification and subsequent business tax breaks leading up to the Olympics was so great in that one concentrated area that the ENTIRE Tower Hamlets looks decent statistically but the reality is very different.