This story is from the spring 2025 edition of VICE magazine: THE ROCK BOTTOM ISSUE. To subscribe to receive 4 print issues of our newly relaunched magazine each year, click here.

Look for it, you won’t find it. There isn’t a trace, not an errant red brick, nor a mangled old gate, and just a handful of haunted Facebook photos to remember it by. You can’t even use an ‘all that’s left…’ platitude, because there is, resolutely, nothing left.

Gentrification comes in two forms; the lick of paint and the bulldozer, and that place on Willow Street befell the latter; just like the blacksmiths and pigpens and Molly Houses that were there before. It’s as much a figment of East London’s past as the old ‘Hoxton Fields,’ a lost neighborhood where the hot-blooded playwright Ben Jonson killed a troubled young actor back in 1598, or the Holywell Mount plague pit, which ran alongside the long-buried River Walbrook.

For those who work in the area today (because make no mistake, nobody really ‘lives’ in such a place), Willow Street is a spot for phone calls, vape breaks, lunch dates, a discreet drug buy for the office Christmas party. The kind of urban backwater where you might take five minutes to follow up on that job offer, or leave a funny voice note for Thursday night’s Hinge prospect. Yet for myself and a select few others, just uttering the name of that road is enough to kick up the butterflies in the stomach.

Willow Street is now dominated by the Nobu Hotel London Shoreditch; a huge, spiky RIBA nightmare that juts out of the ground like a broken Scalextric track, serving wagyu tacos to finance cowboys. Next to it, they’ve built what’s known as a ‘pocket square,’ where a couple of bare pine trees stand forlorn in crushed stone beds—an oasis of airport-style dead space in the middle of what they once tried calling ‘East London Tech City.’

“They were mostly ket-riddled Italians with Jane’s Addiction haircuts, living and dying in light industrial units.”

But a decade and chan