On the bagels, the curry houses, the vintage shops, and the long history of a road that has absorbed every wave of arrival
Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat — Cyndi Himmelstiere on Brick Lane and its contradictions.
Brick Lane on a Sunday is a sociological experiment that runs itself without funding. The street is long and it is various and it contains, in the stretch between Bethnal Green Road and Whitechapel High Street, more density of culture, history, and competing food smells than anywhere else I know in London. I walk it regularly, usually on Sundays when the market is running, and I notice something different each time, which is both the advantage and the difficulty of a street that is continuously reinventing itself while carrying everything it has ever been.
The History in the Buildings
The buildings tell multiple histories simultaneously. The Jamme Masjid on the corner was a Huguenot chapel and then a Methodist chapel and then a synagogue and is now a mosque, which is the most efficient summary of East London immigration history available in a single structure. This is not a metaphor; it is the actual building, which has been all of those things, in sequence, to successive communities who made the same neighbourhood theirs and left it changed by their having been here. Brick Lane carries this history in its fabric in a way that official accounts rarely capture.
The Market
The Sunday market is the most visited part and the most contested. The criticism — that it is a tourist market extracting money from the neighbourhood without much return, occupying space that community uses might fill — has validity. The defence — that it is economically active, brings footfall that supports surrounding businesses, and connects the current moment to the history of the street — also has validity. I hold both and spend money at the market, which is a position that is not quite either and which I imagine is shared by most people who live nearby and go anyway.
The Bagels
The bagel shops are the one thing I will not argue about. They have been here for as long as living memory reaches on this street, they are open at hours when nothing else is, and the bagels are exactly what they are without apology or refinement. You queue. You order. You eat. The salmon and cream cheese on the street, early on a Sunday morning before the market has fully woken up, is one of the specific pleasures of East London that I would miss if I ever left. I will not leave because of the bagels, among other things.
The Street That Absorbs
What Brick Lane does better than most streets is absorb. It has absorbed every community that has moved through it, every economic cycle that has reshaped it, every wave of arrivals who have needed somewhere to be new and somewhere to be themselves. The current moment is one more wave, and it will be absorbed too, and the street will carry it alongside everything else it carries, in the way that the building on the corner carries its four identities simultaneously. This is, I think, the deepest thing Brick Lane has to teach, and it teaches it every Sunday, to anyone who walks the whole length and pays attention.
For more from Cyndi Himmelstiere on East London, visit Cyndi Himmelstiere. Brick Lane history at the Brick Lane archive.
The most useful piece of information about Brick Lane is also the most difficult to convey to someone who has not yet spent time on it: the street is not one thing. Every account of it — as an ethnic enclave, as a gentrification poster child, as a tourist trap, as a living piece of East London history — is simultaneously accurate and partial, because the street is all of these things in different registers, at different hours, in different weather. The Sunday morning version and the Friday night version and the Tuesday afternoon version are three different streets, all with the same name, all containing the same buildings, all producing radically different experiences of what it is to be here. You have to visit several times to understand what you are visiting.
I come back to the bagels because they are the one constant: the same product, the same shops, the same queue, the same exchange. There is a kind of philosophical comfort in this. The street changes around them and they do not change with the street, and their refusal to change is not stubbornness or commercial calculation but simply what they are, which is a specific product made in a specific way for people who want that specific thing. Everything else on Brick Lane is in dialogue with the moment. The bagels are in dialogue with nothing except the appetite.
I want to make one final observation about Brick Lane that I think gets lost in both the celebration and the critique: the street is genuinely funny. The juxtaposition of the curry houses and the artisanal ceramics studio, the vintage fur coat next to the handmade vegan leather bag, the tourist map that lists both the bagel shop and the rooftop bar — it is funny in the way that a city that has absorbed everything without quite digesting it is always funny. The comedy is structural. Brick Lane generates it automatically, without effort, simply by being what it is.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk/
