The rise of Redchurch Street

It's 9.30am on a damp grey Sunday morning on Redchurch Street in the East End and a gaggle of Japanese tourists wearing Comme des Garçons quilted coats is framed against a wall of the city's finest graffiti. They are burrowing into their guidebooks, as a homeless man slumps on the pavement opposite and a group of hoodies outside The Owl & Pussycat pub is loudly discussing their clubbing antics of the night before. From behind metal garage doors thumping hip-hop echoes. The Japanese tourists look puzzled but set off determinedly all the same.

With its neighbourhood nail parlours and minicab firms sitting cheek by jowl with tiny galleries and newly opened boutiques, this shabby street certainly doesn't look like the new Bond Street - but it's being hailed as just that: scouts from Prada, Ralph Lauren, Christian Louboutin and Paul Smith have all been sizing up the tatty Georgian façades in search of new locations. Since Shoreditch House opened around the corner three years ago, quickly followed by Sir Terence Conran's Boundary, which includes a hotel, restaurant, café and what has to be the East End's chicest little deli, all of which do brisk trade every day of the week, the tide has definitely started to turn.

Hip French label APC set up shop, while Sunspel brought its pristine Prince of Wales- approved cotton boxers and T-shirts to the East End with a store on the corner of Boundary Street. Margaret Howell opened her first MHL flagship just around the corner on Old Nichol Street late last year, and directional boutiques such as the menswear specialist Hostem and 11 Boundary began to pop up, too. Further down the street, Aubin & Wills (an unlikely addition to the street given the small independents that dominate) has taken over a big, if rather grim-looking, post-war button factory. There are whispers of Ian Schrager sizing up the nearby Crowne Plaza, and an out-post of Nobu is also due to open, which will hope to cash in on the new tourist trade in the area, the wealth of the City less than a mile away and the affluent creatives who were among the early settlers in the area.

On this grim morning it doesn't feel like the fashion revolution has quite started, but ask any local and they will tell you that the area has already undergone a radical transformation. Few locals have done as much to kick-start this area's renaissance as Les Trois Garçons - the ménage à trois who bought a Victorian pub on the corner of Club Row and Redchurch Street in 1996 and transformed it into one of the capital's most eccentric and talked-about restaurants.

'It was like the wild frontier then,' laughs one of the trio, Hassan Abdullah, perched on a
delicate French sofa in the front of his chandelier-strewn boutique, Maison Trois Garçons, an eclectic antiques and fashion store that, along with the restaurant and popular bar LoungeLover, makes up their East End empire. 'Our friends, girls especially, were scared to come here. They used to say, "You have to come and get us from the cab!"' Before the three relocated from Notting Hill, they hadn't even been to Shoreditch, but they wanted to buy a large building and, after visiting a friend's graduation show nearby, they discovered that the Victorian pub was for sale. The scale of the property won out over the lack of local services and community.

Now, says Abdullah, they and their Goyard-wearing Dalmatian rarely leave. He doesn't find the area's transformation so surprising. 'People forget the proximity to the City here. We are right next to all of the City's wealth. When Boundary and Shoreditch House opened, we started to think that things would really change - if they were moving here then there must be something in it.'

Shoreditch might be cheek by jowl with the shiny towers of the City but historically this was one of London's poorest areas, a renowned slum since the 18th century. It was chronicled by Arthur Morrison in A Child of the Jago in 1896, which followed the hopeless existence of a boy growing up amid the violence, disease and squalor. The city's poorest inhabitants shared these narrow streets with cabinetmakers: in
1890, when 15 acres of slum clearance was carried out, there were 120 cabinetmakers, 74 chairmakers and 24 woodcutters crammed into the tiny grid of streets.

Now, among the City workers, media types and creatives, you are more likely to find fashion designers: most of London's hottest young names, from Christopher Kane to Richard Nicoll, work and live in the East End. Erdem Moralioglu moved into his current studio on Bethnal Green Road, overlooking the shabby rooftops of Redchurch Street, just before Shoreditch House opened its doors. 'It went from nothing to a members' club, an Italian deli, English bistro food, hotel and boutiques just as we moved here,' says the Canadian-born designer who has now lived (in London Fields) and worked in the East End for a decade.

Everyone here likens the transformation to New York's Meatpacking District, which has become the blueprint for fashion takeovers of formerly hostile industrial areas. Erdem adds: 'Time will tell how far it will change. So many things are moving East and that's exciting. I guess it's indicative of how London as a city is spreading out. Whether that is a good or a bad thing depends on who you are.'

For many people around here the sudden interest in Shoreditch, and the predictable dizzying rises in rents and rates that have followed, are anything but good news. It makes sense for young designers to base themselves in the inspiring and gritty East, and many locals view the labels that have so far opened here a good thing - especially when there is a clear synergy, such as Aubin & Wills' bijou cinema and art gallery curated by Stuart Semple - but long gone are the days when Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas set up shop on Redchurch Street. Although Emin, along with Rachel Whiteread, Tim Noble and Sue Webster, still lives in Shoreditch, younger artists have been forced out of the area. Abdullah has already seen many artists, who originally made the area desirable, move out to Hackney or even further afield. 'My worry is that it will become another high street. I would prefer something more organic: to maintain the momentum but stop things like Pret coming in. That's not what this street is about.' He is convinced that the area is not yet ready for the global brands such as Prada and Ralph Lauren and lays all the hype firmly at the door of 'greedy, overzealous estate agents'. Happily for him, so far none of these brands has actually committed to opening a space.