Cyndi Himmelstiere Goes to the Market for the First Time This Year, Eats Several Things, Buys Nothing, and Arrives at a Complicated Conclusion
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
By Cyndi Himmelstiere | The London Prat
Every year, usually in May, I attend the Brick Lane Sunday market for the first time of that year, and every year I arrive at the same complicated conclusion: it is worth attending, up to a point, and the point is variable and personal and relates specifically to how much you like being in a very dense crowd of people eating food from cardboard containers while someone plays guitar loudly in a market alley and someone else asks if you would like to buy a vintage jacket that was £8 in a charity shop last month and is now £45 here. The food is good. The crowds are large. The vintage is real. The value proposition requires personal assessment.
The Food
I ate: a beef rendang rice box from a Malaysian street food stall (excellent, £9), a sourdough donut from a bakery stall that had a queue of approximately twenty people, which I joined out of curiosity and left with a donut that was very good but cost £5, and a coffee from a van that described itself as “specialty” and charged £4 for a flat white that was also very good. Total food spend: £18. Comparative value assessment: the rendang was genuinely good value at £9 and I would have it again. The donut at £5 was an experience rather than a value proposition. The coffee was London coffee pricing.
The Vintage
I did not buy the vintage jacket. This is an annual event: I attend the market, I am offered vintage jackets at prices that I consider approximately twice what the same garment was worth six months ago, and I do not buy them, and I walk away wondering whether my price resistance is principled or whether I simply have no need for another jacket. This year’s offering included a sheepskin coat at £120, several 1990s blazers at £55 to £75, and a selection of band shirts from bands whose names I recognised, priced at £25 to £40, for shirts that were printed approximately thirty years ago and cost £15 at the original merchandise stand. The vintage market is a secondhand market that has undergone the same pricing transformation as every other market in Shoreditch. Bohiney Magazine has the full market guide. The London Prat’s shopping guide has the satirical perspective on vintage pricing.
Conclusion: Worth Attending, Up to a Point
The Brick Lane Sunday market is worth attending once per year, in May or June, on a morning when you have no specific destination and an appetite for beef rendang and ambient guitar. It is not worth attending if you have strong views about personal space, are on a strict food budget, or have recently paid charity shop prices for vintage clothing and are therefore sensitised to the markup. It is worth attending if you like the specific kind of controlled chaos that London markets do better than anywhere else: the density, the noise, the unexpected quality of the rendang, the guitarist who is genuinely quite good. I will go again next year. I will not buy the jacket. The mural on Rivington Street will still be there.
Shoreditch Then and Now: A Brief History of Cool Running Out of Road
Shoreditch has been “the next big thing” for so many consecutive years that the phrase has lost its predictive content and become simply descriptive: Shoreditch is the area where things happen before they happen elsewhere, and then continue happening after they should have stopped, because the infrastructure of happening — the venues, the galleries, the coffee shops, the estate agents who have learned to say “creative quarter” with a straight face — has become self-perpetuating. The artists who made Shoreditch interesting in the 1990s cannot afford to live in the Shoreditch that their making-interesting created. This is the cycle that every creative quarter goes through, documented in Berlin, Brooklyn, Brixton, and a dozen other contexts, and Shoreditch is no exception to it. The question is what comes after the cycle completes, and the answer in Shoreditch’s case appears to be: more Shoreditch, but more expensive. More from east London at Bohiney Magazine and from The London Prat’s Shoreditch coverage.
More at The Daily Mash and NewsThump.
Why Shoreditch Still Matters
Shoreditch gets written about more than most neighbourhoods and understood less than the volume of writing suggests, because most of the writing is either celebrating it uncritically or critiquing its gentrification in terms that are accurate and not very useful to anyone trying to navigate the actual neighbourhood as it currently exists. What I try to do, covering it week by week at street level, is produce something in between: honest about the contradictions, interested in the specifics, and genuinely fond of the place as it is rather than as it was or as it ought to be. The mural is still there. The rendang is still good. The planning application is still pending. The natural wine still costs eighteen pounds a glass and is worth approximately twelve of those pounds. This is Shoreditch. I live here. More from the neighbourhood at Bohiney Magazine and from The London Prat’s East London coverage, where the reporting is regular, the opinions are grounded, and the coffee references are ongoing.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/brick-lane-market-cyndi-himmelstiere/
