2012 London Olympics Causes Artist Rents to Skyrocket
You can’t see out of the east-facing window of artist Dragica Carlin’s London studio, because of all the paintings that are stacked against it. But if you could, you’d be looking straight towards the site of the 2012 Olympic Games, in Hackney, east London. Carlin came to London from Croatia nearly t
You can’t see out of the east-facing window of artist Dragica Carlin’s London studio, because of all the paintings that are stacked against it. But if you could, you’d be looking straight towards the site of the 2012 Olympic Games, in Hackney, east London.
Carlin came to London from Croatia nearly twenty years ago, and like hundreds of other artists, she was attracted to Hackney because of its vibrant and edgy street life and its low-rent studios (it has been estimated that there are more studios here per capita than anywhere in the world). But in the months since London won the right to host next year’s Olympics, fending off rivals such as New York, the lives of artists and other residents have been transformed in sometimes unwelcome ways.
I asked Carlin about this when I interviewed her in her studio a few weeks ago. She told me, “When the announcement was made that London would host the Olympics, our studio rent went up by nearly sixty percent. Lots of property agencies took advantage of the Olympics and started charging market rates on commercially-run properties, like this building.”
So how did artists react? “Many artists had to move out of their studios,” Carlin said, “and those who stayed started to share their spaces by moving more people in. That is why most studios these days in east London are shared by too many artists.”
This was confirmed by another artist I visited just a few streets away. Herve Constant rents a studio from Space, an organization co-founded by Op-Art artist Bridget Riley forty years ago. “The writing is on the wall. The truth is the rent is rocketing and artists will have to move even further to the east of London to find more suitable and affordable studios,” Constant said.
A housing project across the park from Constant’s studio was set ablaze during the riots earlier this year. Supporters of the Olympic development will say that it is addressing some of the root causes of the riots, namely poverty and joblessness. But as this recent article in The Guardian shows, there is a price to be paid: the erasure of ways of living that gave the area its art-centric identity in the last few decades.
And there is a lesson for New York City here, too. Despite losing the Olympic bid, parts of Manhattan and Brooklyn went ahead anyway with rezoning changes — specifically the far west side of Manhattan, and the Brooklyn waterfront in Greenpoint and Williamsburg. So if you’re an artist currently slapping paint around or filming dual-screen projections of your own hair in a converted Williamsburg factory for a just-about affordable rent, maybe you’d better start saving up your deposit for that impending condo conversion.
