Seongsu-dong

Where it sits. Seongsu-dong occupies the flat ground of Seongdong District between the Han River to the south and the Jungnangcheon stream to the west, directly across the water from Apgujeong and Gangnam. It is split into Seongsu-dong 1-ga and 2-ga and served by three stations — Seongsu and Ttukseom on Subway Line 2, whose tracks run overhead on a steel and concrete viaduct through the middle of the district, and Seoul Forest on the Suin-Bundang Line. The elevated railway is the defining piece of the streetscape: it throws a moving shadow across the main road, and the cafés underneath it have built their whole design language around the noise of trains passing above.

The story behind it. This was a factory district, and it still partly is. From the 1960s the riverside flats filled with small industry that the growing city needed but did not want to see — printing houses, metal fabricators, tanneries, car repair yards and, above all, shoemakers. Seongsu remains the centre of Korean handmade footwear, with several hundred workshops still cutting and lasting by hand in basements and second floors, supported by a municipal shoe promotion centre and a signposted handmade-shoe street. Walk two streets off the café strip and the sound changes to compressors, sewing machines and the smell of solvent and leather.

The conversions. From around 2014 the red-brick warehouses began turning into galleries and coffee houses, and Seongsu acquired the nickname the Brooklyn of Seoul. The pattern was consistent and, at its best, unusually honest: a 1970s grain warehouse reopened as a cavernous gallery-café with its steel trusses, brick and floor drains untouched; a metal factory became a bakery that left the raw concrete, the crane rails and the oil stains exactly where they were; a former chemical plant became a stacked complex of small independent shops. Shipping containers were used for whole buildings. The result is a district where the industrial fabric is the interior design rather than a theme applied over it, and where a shoe workshop and a natural wine bar frequently share a stairwell. The brick itself is worth noticing: the standard red brick of 1970s Seoul light industry, laid in stretcher bond with steel window frames, is a material almost entirely absent from the rest of the city's rebuilt centre, and it is the single reason photographs of Seongsu look unlike photographs of anywhere else in Korea.

Gentrification, openly argued. Seongsu is also the place where Seoul first tried to do something about displacement. In 2015 the city and the district negotiated voluntary agreements with landlords and tenants intended to cap rent increases and keep the small businesses that had made the area attractive, one of the earliest formal responses to gentrification anywhere in the country. It slowed the process without stopping it. Since the early 2020s the neighbourhood has become the national capital of the pop-up store, with brands taking short leases on empty shopfronts for two-week runs, and weekend queues that fold around corners. Luxury houses now stage shows here, and the flats around Seoul Forest are among the most expensive in the country.

On screen. No single production owns Seongsu the way Parasite owns the stairs of Ahyeon-dong, but the district is one of the most heavily used backdrops in contemporary Korean television and music video, precisely because it offers something no other part of Seoul does at this scale: brick, steel, an elevated railway and low sightlines, all within twenty minutes of the studios. Its most consequential real-world event is remembered rather than filmed. On 21 October 1994 a span of the Seongsu Bridge, which crosses from here to Apgujeong, collapsed during the morning rush and thirty-two people died, most of them commuters and schoolchildren on a bus. The disaster reshaped Korean construction oversight; the rebuilt bridge reopened in 1997 and a memorial stands at its northern approach.

Getting there and timing. Seongsu Station, Line 2, exits 3 and 4, opens onto the main café blocks along Yeonmujang-gil; Ttukseom Station is closer to the river and Seoul Forest Station to the park. The district is flat, which makes it one of the easier neighbourhoods in Seoul to walk or to roll through, though many of the converted factories have a step or a loading ramp at the entrance and lifts are rare in older buildings. Weekday afternoons are the sane time to come, since weekend queues at the pop-ups routinely run past an hour. Spring and autumn are the pleasant seasons and the outdoor seating makes sense then. Seoul Forest is a five-minute walk south-west and the Han River bike path is directly beyond it, which makes an obvious half-day loop: workshops, coffee, park, river.