The Shoreditch fixture's days are numbered.
News just in that Boxpark Shoreditch — the first of the container-based mini-malls — is to close. The venue right beside Shoreditch High Street station will cease trading "by the end of summer 2024" after 13 years of experimental fashion boutiques, bubble tea emporia and other space-limited trade. The site has reached the end of its lease, and must finally make way for the much-delayed Bishopsgate Goodsyard development.
But it's not so much "goodbye" as "oh, so you're moving over there, then?". Two new venues will open later this year. The first is a five minute walk away at Liverpool Street, in a development being dubbed a "Boxhall" (we'll look into that a bit more in the near future). The second is a new Boxpark at the Buck Street Market site in Camden Town. A new site in Liverpool (proper, not Street) opened recently, and one in Bristol is also on the way.
We'll be sad to see Shoreditch's go. We were there when Boxpark Shoreditch first opened in 2011. It felt edgy and exciting at the time; a way for smaller start-ups to have a go at retail, alongside bigger, established brands. Over the years, some 250 brands, big and small, have inhabited its containers. We even pitched in ourselves, hosting what may have been the world's first 'pub quiz' in a shipping container.
Boxpark has been a qualified success story. It went on to launch larger venues in both Croydon and Wembley. However, it's never quite lived up to its own ambitions of opening "six-to-twelve sites around London" in its early years. Kudos, though, to Boxpark for navigating, evolving and gradually growing through a hellish 13 years for retail, when so many places have struggled or closed. We'll watch these new developments with interest.
