Earlier in the year I visited Seoul, capital of South Korea. While on the
plane I made a list of places that I should visit. I wrote them down on a
piece of paper. I still have that piece of paper. The first item on the list
is "Seoul". The second item is "hotel". I wanted to visit my hotel
because it had a shower and a bed. The third item reads "USB plug / adapter".
The fourth item reads "no plane internet".
For some reason I also wrote "chloe kim" in one of the corners. I wish I had
made the list before I got on the plane. In the end I just picked places at
random. But that's okay, because Seoul is the kind of place where you can
walk for half an hour and find something interesting.
One place I was keen to visit was Yongsan Electronics Market. In the 1990s it
was a legendarily seedy dive where you could pick up computer components
and cameras that were unavailable elsewhere.
"Anam"-branded Nikons, rare toys and the like. Yongsan was also legendarily overpriced and
user-hostile, but in the words of Oscar Wilde, "the one thing worse than being
talked about is not being talked about".
Alas, time has not been kind. Yongsan still exists, but it has been strangled
by the modern age. It's not alone. I'm old enough to remember when Tottenham
Court Road in London was famous for its electronics shops. They're all gone
now. I'm also old enough to remember the Something And Something Exchange shops in Notting Hill, which are also gone.
Heck, I'm old enough to remember when it felt exciting to go out to the shops.
That doesn't happen any more. The buildings remain, but the shops are now
coffee shops, banks, fashion shops, American candy shops, vape shops, just
like everywhere else.
Central Seoul is slick, the edges less so
Back in 2019 I visited Hong Kong. I popped along to a place called Sim City,
which is another famous electronics shop. To my surprise Sim City was actually
pretty healthy. It was bustling, the prices were decent - no cheaper than
online, but at the same time no more expensive - and it still felt like a
going concern. Yongsan on the other hand is moribund. Judging by
this story
in the Korean Herald it has been in trouble since at least 2018, and there are
constant rumours that it will be demolished.
The major issue is high rent, presumably from landlords who want to squeeze
the last few drops of juice from their asset, which is ironic because the
shops in Yongsan had exactly the same business model. They had a lot of junk
at inflated prices, and they wanted to squeeze the last few drops of juice
from the junk, and they would rather have died than admit defeat and offer a
discount. In the end they did just that, they died.
I was directly inspired to visit the place by
this fascinating blog post
by a chap called Lui Gough. He visited at the tail end of 2024. I visited a
year and a month later and it was no better. How do you get there? Go to Seoul
first. Then take the underground to Yongsan station. Alternatively, and this
is what I did, get off at Namyeong and head west, through the little streets.
They're full of small shops selling CCTV cameras and memory sticks, although
they have the same problem as Yongsan.
Yongsan is a complex of buildings. I visited 19-20-21-22. The ground floor, on the street, was the most active:
The second shop had what appeared to be an Apple XServe in the window. Not something you see every day. In order to convert Korean Won into British GBP you have to halve the result and chop off the thousands. 200,000 Won is £100. That's a bit steep for an 2013-vintage i5-4570 desktop machine with 8gb of memory. In comparison an equivalent HP EliteDesk or Acer Aspire sells for around £60 on eBay in the UK.
Venturing inside the complex was an odd experience. Over the years the shops
have transformed from actual shops into storage areas for eBay businesses. A
few of them give the impression that you could knock on the window and order
something in-person, but most were unstaffed:
Peculiar things I saw included a stack of CRTs, a load of fans, a hoarder's
lair, and STALKER 2. As a little interactive exercise I've jumbled
up the following images so that they aren't in the same order as the text. Try
to match the descriptions to the images:
In the end Chloe Kim was beaten into silver place by Choi Ga-on of, yes, South
Korea. Perhaps that's why I wrote "chloe kim" on my itinerary. I was fatigued
after a twelve-hour flight and I wanted to cling to something nice, like a
little monkey clinging onto a piece of wire with cloth on it.
But the Winter Olympics didn't start until a fortnight after I returned from
Seoul. How could I have known?
Further into the building were some hi-fi shops that seemed to be staffed,
selling DJ gear and what looked like quite posh speakers and so forth. That
part of the complex appeared to be actually working. But most of the other
shops seemed to have piles of old computer junk, so after wandering through
the different floors I made my leave. It wasn't until the very end that one of
the staff tried to engage with me, but my French simply wasn't good enough to
conduct a business deal so my dreams of coming back to the UK with a cheap M1
Mac Mini were dashed.
So I popped along to
Filmlog, a shop on the other side of Seoul that has a film vending machine outside:
Looking through my old emails, I can see that back in 2009 I paid £7.90 for
two rolls of Fuji Velvia 50, from 7DayShop. Does 7DayShop still exist?
Apparently so, but it doesn't sell film any more. Now film is £15 or so
for a single roll. Filmlog's prices were no lower than the rest of the world,
but no higher either.
I stood outside Filmlog, thinking "if a refrigerator is warmer than the
outside air, is it still a refrigerator", and "why do we write fridge with the
letter D, but re-frige-rator without the letter D", and "my nose is cold".
Then I made my way to Makercity Sewoon, which is basically the same as Yongsan
but closer to the centre. It's mid-way along Cheonggyecheon.
There used to be a blog called Things White People Like. I don't
know if it's still around, but if it was, it would have an article on
Cheonggyecheon. As I looked at the stream I was not a tourist, I was an
urbanist. A documentarian. An urbanist documentarian. And a curator.
Makercity Sewoon is in theory a mixture of shops and workspaces, funded by the
government as a way of kickstarting the economy, but it's basically the same
as Yongsan. A lot of eBay storage areas. It's located in a curiously massive
linear complex that stretches north-south for almost a kilometre, just to the
east of Central Seoul. The surrounds are being excavated, so who knows how
long it will last.
In general Sewoon seemed to have a lot of electronics gear that had been
dumped there in 1995, and not updated since:
I've never seen a DAT recorder before. DAT was a digital tape format from the late 1980s. It was like compact disc, but tape. A few albums were released on DAT - Factory Records went big on the format - but the music industry hated it because it was lossless and could in theory be used to create perfect pirate copies of compact discs. It took off in the professional audio and radio markets, where it became a standard for exchanging digital masters of recordings, although surprisingly it was never popular as a recording format (the Alesis ADAT used standard VHS video tapes instead).
A few years later it was displaced by Sony's Minidisc and Philips' Digital
Compact Cassette, which both used lossy compression. Of the two new formats
Minidisc survived longer, although as of 2026 the players and the recording
media have all been discontinued. A mutant offspring of DAT survives as a type
of computer backup tape. They are all equal now.
Ironically analogue compact cassette is still around. Maxwell still
manufactures new cassette tapes, because hipsters dig them. A bit of Googling
suggests that the tape decks pictured above are pretty decent, but even if
they had been cheap, and recently serviced, I would have had no way to bring
them back to the UK. Imagine being stopped by customs for trying to smuggle a
tape deck into the UK, in 2026.
And so both Yongsand and Sewoon are experiences rather than practical shopping
destinations. The feeling of wandering through piles of junk from the 1990s
was powerfully melancholic. Curiously there were no games consoles and only a
handful of video games, and they tended to be PlayStation 4 discs rather than
retro OG PlayStation titles from the 1990s. Perhaps there's a completely
separate retro console scene.
I finished off the day by checking out some of the camera shops at Namdaemun,
just north-east of Seoul Station. They're intimidating, and I didn't go in,
but if you fancy a Rollei 35 and you speak a bit of Korean and are willing to
pay through the nose, Bob's your uncle.
I even saw a couple of Mamiya C3s, looking the worse for wear. They stood out
because I actually had a Mamiya C3 with me. I took it to Seoul, with some
Kodak TMAX that expired back in 2007:
And that was my experience of shopping in Seoul. The high street is not what it was, not just in Britain but in the whole world.
