Cyndi Himmelstiere on the Market, the Bagels, the Tourists, the Residents, and the Specific Democracy of a Street That Contains Everything Simultaneously
Reported by Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
By Cyndi Himmelstiere | DitchPitch.uk
Brick Lane on a Sunday morning is the most London thing that London does. I have been going on Sunday mornings for seven years and I have not tired of it, which surprises me because I have tired of many things in seven years and Brick Lane on a Sunday produces conditions — the density, the noise, the smell of the bagel bakery that has been open twenty-four hours since 1974 and that produces the specific combination of warm bread and toasted sesame that constitutes, for a substantial portion of London’s population, a Proustian trigger for every good Sunday morning they have ever experienced in this city.
What Brick Lane Actually Is
Brick Lane is a street in Tower Hamlets that has been, across its documented history, a Jewish garment district, a Bangladeshi curry house corridor, an art and creative quarter, a market street, and a tourist destination, sometimes simultaneously. The Huguenot refugees who settled here in the seventeenth century built the church on Fournier Street that subsequently became a synagogue and then a mosque, which is either a remarkable piece of London’s layered immigration history or the most convenient single building for explaining that history to people who need it explained, depending on how compressed you need the lesson to be. The history is real. The street carries it in its architecture and its current demographic mixture in ways that make walking it a relatively compressed seminar in what the East End has been and is.
The Sunday market is technically several markets: the Backyard Market, the Boiler House Food Hall, the Vintage Market, and the loose array of street traders and food stalls that occupy the northern end of the street and its surrounding streets and that have been expanding and contracting and relocating and reestablishing in slightly different configurations for as long as I have been coming. The market sells clothes, records, vintage furniture, art prints, street food from approximately thirty different national traditions, and the specific category of objects that are described as “vintage” but are actually the cast-offs of the previous decade’s interior design trends that someone has cleaned up and is selling at a multiple of their charity shop value because the setting makes them interesting.
The Bangladeshi Community and the Curry House Economy
The Bangladeshi community that gave Brick Lane its curry house identity — and that gave the street the specific demographic character that made it the subject of Monica Ali’s 2003 novel and multiple subsequent cultural representations — is both still here and under the same pressures that immigrant communities in gentrifying neighbourhoods face everywhere: rising rents, changing customer demographics, the specific challenge of maintaining cultural and economic identity in a neighbourhood where the economic conditions are being reshaped by forces that the community did not set in motion and does not fully control. The curry houses that remain are mostly good. Some are among the best in London. The competition from the neighbourhood’s expanding diversity of restaurant options has eliminated the weakest and made the survivors better, which is the market mechanism operating in the restaurant sector as it operates everywhere else. According to the Tower Hamlets Council, the Bangladeshi community remains one of the borough’s largest demographic groups and maintains significant institutional and commercial presence in the area. The community is not disappearing. It is navigating, which is what communities in London have always done.
Why I Vote Yes With Reservations
The yes is for what the street does at its best: hold multiple communities, multiple histories, multiple economic registers, and multiple versions of what London is in the same space simultaneously without requiring any of them to resolve into a single coherent identity. The reservations are for what the tourist economy does to a street when it is successful: the gradual displacement of the things that made it worth visiting by things designed to serve visitors who have come to see the things that are gradually being displaced, which is the specific circularity of cultural tourism that Brick Lane has been managing with varying degrees of success for twenty years. The bagel bakery that has been open since 1974 is still open. The synagogue-mosque is still the synagogue-mosque. The street art changes but continues. The curry houses continue. The vintage market expands. The tourists arrive and they are not wrong to arrive, because what they have come to see is genuinely here, even as the presence of so many people coming to see it changes the thing they have come to see in ways that are measurable and real. This is London. This is Brick Lane. The bagel is still very good. I buy one every Sunday. I have been buying one every Sunday for seven years. Some things are worth the complication of remaining among them.
Cyndi Himmelstiere writes about Shoreditch and East London. Her homepage is at The London Prat.
For more East London culture and community writing, visit The Poke.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
The specific detail I find most affecting about Brick Lane is not the tourist economy or the gentrification narrative but the quiet persistence of the things that have simply continued: the bagel bakery, open since 1974, that has seen every wave of change in the street’s recent history and has continued to make bagels because the bagels were always the point and the point does not change with the economic conditions of the surrounding neighbourhood. The shop is small. The queue on Sunday mornings is long and patient. People of every demographic that the street contains are in the queue simultaneously. The bagel costs a pound something. It is always warm. It is one of the best things available in this city for a pound something and the fact that it remains available at that price in a street where everything else has repriced to the current market level is either a miracle of institutional stubbornness or evidence that some things are simply too well-established to move with the market, which is the kind of thing that cities need and rarely plan for. I am in the queue every Sunday. I will be there next Sunday. The bagel will be warm. The street will be what it is. London will be doing what it does. I vote yes, with the reservations noted, and I will be back next week to cast the same vote again.
