Watch Hoxton Culture Code: From Shakespeare’s first playhouse on Curtain Road to the cutting-edge ceramics and sculpture on show at the Rivington gallery

Watch Hoxton Night Code: We shine a light on the darker side of Hoxton to give you a taste of the bars, clubs and cafes that pull in the crowds

WALK DOWN Oxford Street and you are besieged by tin-rattling charity workers. Stroll along Drury Lane and you are buffeted by theatregoers.

Stand in Hoxton Square for more than five minutes and someone will try to sell you drugs. Sorted. Hoxton, which is, and always has been, edgy, is the subject of the new Times Online web television series launched this week.

Down in the Domesday Book as Hogesdon, it was once the outer limit of London — a mess of theaters, madhouses and brothels.

Shakespeare first staged Romeo and Juliet beneath the estate agents on Curtain Road. The diseased, the demented and the damned stalked just a pickled shark’s throw from the White Cube gallery. London has grown up all around and Hoxton has cleaned up. But not completely. It is no longer on the edge, but Hoxton is still edgy. short walk from Old Street or a quick dash on the micro-scooter from Liverpool Street, but it remains stubbornly off-grid. Because it rubs shoulders with Shoreditch, enterprising estate agents have dubbed it ShoHo or HoxDitch. Neither has stuck. There are few tourists and the locals wish there were even fewer. Most tourists visit the White Cube, home of Britart, featuring faintly shocking shows with Sam Taylor-Wood, Gavin Turk and she-of-the-unmade-bed.

Nearly 50 art-eries, of varying size and quality, have sprung up. La Viande on Charlotte Road now sells eclectic local work but it was home to the Stuckists. Led by Charles Thomson, the antiBritart movement carried a coffin to the White Cube marking the death of figurative painting. Like so many jobbing artists, Thomson has moved away, citing house prices. The lofts that lured artists here in the 1990s are no longer cheap. And the most successful artists are no longer poor.

Commerce, as ever, follows creativity. Since 2000, bonus-laden workers from the City next door have been buying up Hoxton brick by brick. The lofts may look the same, but inside they’re all underfloor heating and reproduction Eames chairs. The coolest may even have a few Hirst dot prints dotted around.

“It’s definitely gentrifying,” says Ekow Eshun, Hoxtonite and artistic director of the Institute for Contemporary Arts, whom I interviewed for the series. “Yes, there are million-pound properties and expensive cars parked on cleaned-up streets. But Hoxton is still cool — it’s still the home of all the key trends in art, music and fashion. Cool is like the genie in the bottle: as soon as you say a place or person is cool, it’s over. People have been saying Hoxton is cool for so long it’s a cliché. But, like all clichés, it’s got some truth to it. I live here for a reason.

Well, several reasons actually. There’s the stylish Hoxton Boutique and Murdock, the metrosexual male grooming palace. Les Trois Garçons Restaurant, close at hand on Club Row, puts the kitsch in kitchen and there are guerrilla gigs upstairs at the nearby Old Blue Last pub.

Yet, for all the gentrification, Hoxton remains slightly more Banksy than banker. For now.

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