Cyndi Himmelstiere on the Market That Is Both Genuinely Great and Genuinely Complicated and Why Both Things Are True at Once
Brick Lane on a Sunday is the most concentrated form of London’s contradictions available in a single street on a single morning, and I mean that as description rather than criticism, though the description contains enough criticism that the distinction is doing some work. It is a market that serves at least four different populations simultaneously: the Bangladeshi community for whom the street is a home high street and the Sunday market is a source of familiar goods at fair prices; the vintage and second-hand shoppers who come for the clothing and the records and who have been coming since before the bagel shops had queues; the tourist contingent for whom Brick Lane represents ‘authentic London’ in a way that the marketing of authentic London has made entirely inauthentic; and the brunch contingent, which is its own ecosystem with its own logic and its own relationship to the street that is primarily mediated through avocado toast and the Overground.
The thing about Brick Lane that I find myself defending to people who have written it off as tourist infrastructure is that all four of these populations exist simultaneously in a way that most London streets cannot manage. The Bangladeshi sweet shops are between the vintage clothes rails. The bagel shops — Beigel Bake on the corner, open all hours, producing the best salt beef bagel in London at a price that has not kept pace with inflation in any meaningful way and which I suspect is maintained through a combination of efficiency and genuine resistance to the market forces that have repriced everything around them — serve the same customers they served twenty years ago alongside the food photographers documenting the sesame seeds for accounts with fifty thousand followers.
The Reservations
The reservations are about the direction of travel. The curry houses on Brick Lane have been under pressure for years from rising rents and changing food culture and several have closed or retreated from the model that made the street’s reputation for South Asian food in ways that the tourist infrastructure has not absorbed. The street that was a Bangladeshi commercial hub is becoming a market destination with Bangladeshi heritage, and the distinction matters even if the Sunday crowds do not notice it. More from me at Cyndi Himmelstiere.
SOURCE: http://prat.UK
