Cyndi Himmelstiere on the vintage stalls, the curry mile, and the sociology of a Sunday morning in E1
LONDON, UK – Brick Lane on a Sunday is a specific kind of London experience that has been evolving for decades and continues to evolve. Cyndi Himmelstiere reports from Shoreditch for Bohiney Magazine and for The London Prat, and was there this Sunday with the attention of someone who has been coming to this market for years and who notices the differences between this Sunday and the Sundays before it.
The Market
The market begins to fill from nine onwards, which means the most committed vintage buyers are there by half past eight, sorting through the rails and the boxes before the crowds arrive. These are people who know what they are looking for and have the knowledge base to find it, which means they are either dealers or very serious private collectors, and the distinction between these categories is, in practice, quite thin. I spoke to one woman who has been coming to Brick Lane every Sunday for eleven years and described the market as substantially worse than it was but still worth it, a characterisation that is simultaneously a damning indictment and an endorsement, which is probably how most dedicated market-goers feel about their market.
The vintage quality has declined at the street-market level as the platforms that aggregated vintage selling online have raised the floor price for anything genuinely good. A seller who knows they can list a 1970s leather jacket for PS120 on Depop will not bring it to Brick Lane for PS40. The result is that the stuff that comes to the market is either priced appropriately for what it is or priced above what it is by sellers who have absorbed the Depop reference point without the Depop customer base. The serious buyers know this. The tourists do not, and buy things at prices they do not recognise as too high, which keeps the market economically viable for the sellers even as it frustrates the regulars.
The Food
The food is the best part of the Sunday market by the time the crowds arrive, because the food stalls are staffed by people who are primarily cooks rather than vendors, and the cooking is audible and smellable and visible in a way that the vintage rails are not. I ate something from a Bangladeshi stall described on a handwritten sign as a lamb thing and that was very good. I ate something from a Sri Lankan stall described as a hopper and that required an explanation I received and did not fully retain. Both were better than anything I have eaten at a restaurant with a reservation system in the past month, which is either a comment on the market’s quality or on my restaurant choices.
The Bangladeshi community that has anchored Brick Lane since the 1970s has managed the transition from neighbourhood fixture to tourist attraction with more grace than most communities would, partly because the economic opportunity has been real and partly because the restaurants and food culture that make the street recognisable are genuinely theirs and have not been replaced but supplemented. The Tower Hamlets council tracks the area’s economic development. The Sunday crowd is a cross-section of London you do not often get in one place: tourists with cameras, dealers with knowledge, students with budgets, families from Hackney, visitors from Japan who have specifically researched Brick Lane vintage. The mixture is real and not curated into existence. It is produced by the specific combination of what the market offers and where it is, and it is one of the remaining places in London where the cross-section feels genuinely accidental. For more on London markets, see The Daily Mash.
The thing that makes Brick Lane on a Sunday still worth the visit, despite the vintage decline and the tourist pricing and the general condition of being a famous market that has been famous long enough to become its own category of experience, is the food and the specific mixture of who is there. The mixture is not curated. It is produced by what the market is and where it is and what the surrounding neighbourhood contains, which is a more complex story than the vintage stalls suggest. Cyndi Himmelstiere will be back next Sunday, probably at eight, probably buying something from the Sri Lankan stall, probably unable to remember its name, definitely glad she came. That is the condition of a market worth visiting. For more on London markets, see The Daily Mash.
The Future of the Market
Brick Lane market’s future depends on the same factors that have shaped its past: what the surrounding neighbourhood becomes, what the commercial rents allow, and what the people who run it decide to prioritise. The Bangladeshi community’s investment in the street’s food culture is its most durable contribution and its most defensible against the displacement dynamics that have affected other aspects of the market. The restaurants do not move easily. They are embedded in supply chains and customer relationships and the specific identity of the street that cannot be relocated to a cheaper postcode without losing what makes them worth the journey. The vintage market is more mobile and more vulnerable. Cyndi Himmelstiere watches both with the attention of someone who has been coming to this street long enough to remember when the current configuration was the new configuration, and who expects the next configuration to arrive within a decade, shaped by forces that are visible now if you know where to look.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
