Cyndi Himmelstiere navigates the bagel shops, vintage markets, and philosophical contradictions of E1 on a Sunday
Satire from Bohiney.com and prat.uk.
By Cyndi Himmelstiere | The London Prat
Brick Lane on a Sunday is London at its most concentrated and its most contradictory: a street that contains Bengali restaurants, vintage clothing shops, art galleries, street food stalls, the two legendary bagel shops that have been there since before anyone in the current demographic was born, and the kind of tourist density that produces the particular traffic pattern of a market street where everyone is moving in every direction simultaneously and negotiating passage with the physical diplomacy of people who have nowhere urgent to be but are in each other’s way regardless.
I go every few weeks, which is often enough to feel like a local doing a local thing and infrequently enough that I still find it interesting rather than routine. The Sunday Upmarket — the vintage and craft market in the old Truman Brewery — is, at this point, a city institution, selling handmade jewellery, vintage denim, artisanal condiments, and the kind of decorative objects that look excellent in the market and less excellent in a small Shoreditch flat where space is at a premium. I have purchased three such objects. They are all on the mantelpiece. They look fine.
The Bagel Shops
The two 24-hour bagel shops at the southern end of Brick Lane — Beigel Bake and Beigel Shop — are the element of the street that most accurately represents what the street was and what it remains, which is the most important distinction in a neighbourhood that has otherwise transformed substantially. They have been there for decades, serving salt beef and smoked salmon bagels at prices that are genuinely accessible rather than accessibly priced, which is a different thing. The queue at Beigel Bake on a Sunday morning extends to the street. It moves quickly. The bagels are excellent in the uncomplicated way that things are excellent when they have been done correctly for a very long time and have no interest in being different.
The Bengali restaurants that have given Brick Lane part of its identity — the Curry Mile, as it is sometimes called, though the mile is more of a concentrated half-mile — have become more complex in their relationship to the street’s current demographic. Some have adapted their menus and their presentation to the tourist trade. Others continue as they were, serving the same food to a slightly different clientele mix, which is a reasonable business adaptation to the market that now surrounds them. The quality varies by establishment, as it always has. The best ones are extraordinary. The London Prat recommends visiting on a weekday morning if possible, when the crowds are a quarter of what Sunday produces and the same bagels are available with more pavement space around them. The Daily Mash has opinions about Brick Lane tourism that are accurate and unkind and therefore useful. Go for the bagels. The rest is negotiable.
London continues to be London — impossible, expensive, exhausting, magnificent, and entirely worth the trouble. The city absorbs its contradictions with the practised ease of a place that has been absorbing contradictions for two thousand years and has not yet resolved them and is not particularly trying to. This is the London that the blog post is about, on any given week, regardless of the specific topic. The specific topic is the entry point. London is the subject.
The city keeps moving. So does the writing. Both are better for the other.
Why This Matters for London
London is a city that rewards sustained attention. The first visit gives you the monuments and the museums. The second gives you the neighbourhoods. The third gives you the rhythms — the way the city moves through its week, the difference between a Tuesday morning and a Saturday afternoon, the specific energy of each season and each district. The fourth visit, and the fifth, and the years of living here, give you the understanding that London is not a fixed thing to be known but a living thing to be followed, which changes as you change and produces new things to notice regardless of how long you have been here.
This is what the writing is for — the blog entries, the columns, the journalism local and satirical and serious that tries to put words on what London is doing this week and why it matters to the people in it. The city is too large for complete coverage. The attempt is worth making. Every piece of attention paid to a specific corner of this specific city is a contribution to the collective understanding of a place that eight million people call home and that hundreds of millions more carry in their imagination as the London they know from films, from books, from the news, from the relative who emigrated here in 1970 and still has an opinion about it. The real London and the imagined London coexist. This writing lives in the gap between them, trying to make the real one visible. That is the project. It continues.
East End reading: The Daily Mash | NewsThump
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com
