A little over a decade ago, East London was the poorest place in town. Contrary to the popular phrase, you probably could wipe your arse with it. Now, speed things up ten years and come with me for a wander down Brick Lane. It is the essence of the East (London).
Brick Lane, E.1.
If you took Lygon Street in Melbourne, shrunk it to about one tenth its size, turned the pasta houses to curry joints, exchanged the ice cream stores for barbers (who provide one slick black haircut and one slick black haircut only) and traded harassing Italians for harassing Asians (the English type), then you’re probably still miles off. But at least you have a starting point.
In fact the Melbourne analogy works quite well, because all the edgy grunge and pseudo street grit that makes inner-city Melbourne so ‘real’ and ‘cool’ and such a cosmopolitan conjoint of poverty and capitalism, is predicated on the reality that Brick Lane truly is a meeting of these two things. Marinated in British comedy.
Brick Lane has roughly 30,000 curry restaurants in an area about the size of your palm, most claiming to be Indian, but ALL employing Bangladeshis in the kitchen. So if you’re looking for authenticity, maybe try somewhere else, but if it’s cricket you want to talk, you won’t be disappointed. These restaurants like to employ hagglers who stand outside and implore you to come in for their great ‘deals’. Well, not only are the ‘deals’ full of shit and the bartering strangely one-way, but there is a high chance these guys are all involved in criminal activity. Avoid them.
The Times Square of bad Indian food
Aside from curry houses, mosques and the impoverished, everything else on Brick Lane is geared towards the young, hip and (un)fashionable. It is here that they congregate en masse, swarming to the bars, cafes and shops that so adequately know the needs of this demographic section. I’ll take my tongue out of my cheek and say that these are all pretty cool. The bars are generally full all the time, there’s plenty of live music, the food is good and of a price and it’s pretty much the best place to go out if you know what’s up. So what’s not to like?
This place is cool. Go there
But when in Brick Lane, you should be as aware of these youngsters as you are of any of its other charms. It’s as though a bizarro version of that Brendan Fraser film Blast From the Past had been filmed in East London. These kids have got it. Whatever ‘it’ is, they have it in spades. In fact they have so much of it, they’ve become immune to its charms. Which might explain why so many of them walk around with a blank expression and latent nihilistic tendencies. Sure, I never understood why wearing your grandparents’ clothes, thus making you look like a goober from 1982 with trousers too short, sports socks, thick-framed glasses, an inordinate amount of brown and green plaid and a bad haircut, made you look good. But then I’m merely a visitor; I don’t claim to know this shit. And while you get the impression that at some point in the last 50 years, nobody told Brick Lane the war was over, they do look awesome. So don’t let me or anyone else tell you otherwise.
This guy is cool, right down to his home made sandwich
On the weekends the markets come out. You’ll need a whole new article on Pavement Etiquette just to navigate the lane safely, but there’s every chance you’ll find a sweet top hat, or eat some legit Jamaican grub or hear some guy singing about ‘wrecking your body clock’. It’s a fun place to be if it’s a sunny Sunday arvo.
It’s also a great place to be if you are stumbling home drunk at 4am, because there’s this bagel shop that does a salt beef with English mustard and pickle. Do not even fuck around. Just get it and inhale it. You will never be the same. If you live around here long enough you start dreaming about salt beef bagels, bringing them to work functions, introducing them to your friends, letting them hang out with your girlfriend. Dangerous, but ultimately life-changing.
Don’t think twice, it’s salt beef.
A little earlier I touched on the meeting of capitalism and poverty and how inspiring Brick Lane has become. I met my muse for this piece earlier today. He is the very essence of what I’m talking about. Wearing the full grey cotton sweatpant tracksuit (I told you so?), this budding middle aged entrepreneur held out his hand and asked me for some change. I gave him the 11p that I had and wished him good luck. As I walked off, he turned and fired the penny at me from 10 yards exclaiming how fucking useless it was to him. This is Brick Lane in a nutshell: a discerning beggar – who is also a chooser – with a bad throwing arm possibly taught to him by the Bangladeshis posing as Indians. Which is to say, strangely enticing.
Mackaveli
