What Do Shakespeare and Hi-ReS! have in Common?
Three metres below. The same ground.
I read about it in the news, the way you find out about most things you should have known.
The building was gone. The entire area had been absorbed into a £750m regeneration project called The Stage. And three metres below what had been our floor, archaeologists from the Museum of London had found the walls of the Curtain Theatre: the stage where Shakespeare’s company performed Romeo and Juliet for the first time, in 1597. Discovered in 2012. Fully excavated in 2016.
We had lived above it for almost five years. We had not known.
You reached Plough Yard from Shoreditch High Street through an arch under a railway bridge, blackened with decades of soot, that shook faintly when trains passed overhead. The yard beyond was not the kind of place you ended up by accident. You needed a reason to be there.
We had one. We lived there.
The warehouse was flat and a studio at once. Old Macs. Briefs arriving by phone with no assets and no time. The smell of fried onions drifting in from the burger vans along the high street, feeding clubbers and cab drivers until 4 am, working its way into everything we owned: the walls, the coats, the work.
We moved there in 1999 and stayed until 2004.
Those were the years of soulbath.com, built in thirty days inside a Macromedia Flash trial version, which became the thing that changed everything for us. The years of the Requiem for a Dream website, designed to decay and fall apart and finally kick you out. The years of Donnie Darko, Massive Attack, The Beatles, and the Ninja Tune microsites for Amon Tobin and DJ Food. One night in that alley, we mixed fake blood with Fairy liquid, drew a chalk outline on the cobblestones, and spent twenty minutes explaining ourselves to the Metropolitan Police. We were making the website for the Punisher film: no assets, no brief, 2 am in Shoreditch. That night is its own essay, already written. Read it here:
We were a studio of two, Florian Schmitt and me, in a warehouse above a ghost. No templates. No category. No name for what we were making.
The Curtain Theatre opened in 1577. Shakespeare’s company arrived twenty years later and performed there from 1597 to 1599, in the years before the Globe was built, and the work moved south of the river. Those two years at the Curtain produced Romeo and Juliet. Henry V. The founding repertoire, first performed in a yard you reached through an arch off Shoreditch High Street.
When the demolition crews broke through our floor in 2012, they found the stage walls three metres below. Ceramic money boxes used to collect pennies at the door, still full of Elizabethan coins. Those boxes gave us the phrase we still use: box office. A clay bird whistle, probably used for sound effects. Glass beads. Costume pins. The residue of performances that had happened four hundred years before had left almost nothing on the surface.
The ground had held all of it, in silence, while a railway bridge was built above it. While a warehouse went up. While we moved in and made things, and moved out, the building was razed for offices and retail.
Four centuries. Three metres down. No indication on the surface that anything was there.
Shakespeare’s company was at the Curtain for two years before the Globe. Before the institution. Before the work became permanent, studied, and canonical. Those were the founding years: provisional, generative, made in conditions that left no room for anything unnecessary.
We were at Plough Yard for five years before everything changed. Before Hi-ReS! became a studio with offices in London, Berlin, and New York, before we collaborated with agencies and fashion houses, before the internet was something that had rules and categories and a name for what we were doing inside it. Those were our founding years, too. The most artistically true work, made before the work had a market, made in a building with no heat and a ceiling that let in the rain.
Neither of us knew what we were standing on.
I read the news somewhere in Shoreditch, which I still lived in, which had by 2012 already started to become something else entirely. I was further from the yard by then. More experienced, more fluent, working in a different register. And the discovery landed not as nostalgia but as something stranger: a retroactive caption for the years we had spent in that building.
Four hundred years of the ground holding a founding creative moment, invisible until the demolition broke through the floor.
And above it, for five years, another founding creative moment, just as invisible to the people inside it.
This is what the Field Guide is about.
Not nostalgia for places. Not recommendations for where to go. The information that places carry, that lived experience holds, that no algorithm records because no algorithm was present for it.
Places remember. The ground holds what happened in it. And sometimes you only understand what you were part of after the building comes down.
The signal was always there. It just needed someone to dig.
You can visit the site now.
The Stage development is preserving the Curtain Theatre, which remains in a glass enclosure at its heart. A Museum of Shakespeare is being built directly above where our floor used to be. Soon you will be able to stand there and look down at the stage where Romeo and Juliet was first performed, three metres below the ground you are standing on.
The signal that was always there is becoming the centrepiece of everything built on top of it.
I think about this often when I work with brands whose founding signal has gone quiet underneath years of revision and drift. The signal does not disappear. It waits. Sometimes it takes a demolition to find it again.
This is not a comparison of the work. Shakespeare’s company and Hi-ReS! shared a yard, four centuries apart. That is all. And somehow that is enough.
Plough Yard, Shoreditch EC2. The warehouse: gone. The ground: still there. Felt quality: damp concrete. Late-night permission. The city as collaborator.
Places change. The signal in the ground stays.
What the Ground Holds is a Field Guide to Felt Places. Part of Yūgen Lab.
Alexandra Jugović. © 2026
So glad you unearthed this story, thanks for sharing. And having (finally) just watched "Hamnet" this hits even harder.
🫶