I remember a few years back when this popped up in my inbox, a pdf brochure for a new housing development called Hackney Square.

I thought it was a joke.

The definition of Urban Living?

Sterling Ackroyd have got their wires crossed with this one. Besides the fact that only about three people in east London have a moustache quite as ridiculous as that, people hate hipsters. I don’t understand how putting two guffawing hipsters on a housing brochure is going to entice anybody to move there. It’s like advertising a new-build in Camden and putting three goths on the front.

Does anybody see this and think, I want to look like that, perhaps if i buy a 600K hamster cage in Hackney Square and keep the razor away from my top lip for six months, I could be that guy. I’m not convinced. Hipsters are labelled that because they congeal in poorer/more scuzzy/more vibrant parts of a city where they can feel safer expressing their individuality.

Nobody aspires to be a hipster.

Hipsters are hipster by default because they wear outlandish clothes and grow stupid moustaches and act different to the mainstream. But in doing so simultaneously and all in the same place, by being different together they all become the same, and lose all the individuality they sought to express in the first place. At least this seems to be the approved theory of anybody who lives a stone’s throw west of Aquarium on Old Street roundabout.

What a place.

It strikes me the only folk looking to move into expensive new builds in east London are young french bankers, who let’s face it aren’t the coolest cats on the planet. Will they assimilate to the Hackney Square demographic so explicitly painted by Sterling Ackroyd? Will that kind of moustache cut it amidst the marbled atriums and escalators of Deutsche Bank? How will this work? Will they move in, keep hitting the Gillette with abandon but still hang around with Mr Walrus up-top, keeping a safe distance whilst being cool and hip by association? What is the future of Hackney Square?

Who cares.