Let them eat cake
What the royal wedding cake tells us about London’s hipster takeover
Dave Hill
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s choice of an east London bakery to make their wedding cake brings a long-term relationship between poshness and privation to a royal climax. When the betrothed picked Violet, a café and bakery on a fairly quiet street at the edge of Dalston in Hackney, to produce the star patisserie for their big day, it was a symbolic consummation of what some see as wholesome progress and others as wholesale colonisation.
Could there be a more complete manifestation of the wave of gentrification rippling across the inner city than Violet, and the values it represents? Not on the face of it. A part of the city that not so long ago was (unfairly) synonymous only with poverty and crime, has for some time had the word “fashionable” attached as a prefix, confirming Dalston as a hotspot of hipsterism and all that follows in its wake, where a distinctively London working-class and an archetypally insurgent middle-class meet with an array of juxtapositions and effects.