Harper-Thames on the Sunday market, the curry mile mythology, the Bangladeshi community that made the street before anyone was writing about it, and the two-speed neighbourhood that exists in the same postcode
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
Brick Lane exists in two modes simultaneously and most of its visitors are only aware of one of them. The mode that brings the visitors — the Sunday market, the street art, the curry houses that line the southern stretch, the bagel shops, the vintage clothing, the general atmosphere of an East London that is simultaneously historic and fashionable and authentic in the specific sense that the word authentic has acquired in urban food and culture journalism — is real. It is also a curated version of the street that is constructed partly from its actual history and partly from the story that the city has decided to tell about it.
The mode that precedes and underlies the visitor experience is the Brick Lane of the Bangladeshi community that has made this street its commercial and social centre since the 1970s: the fabric shops and the sari emporia, the halal butchers, the sweet shops selling mithai and roshogolla to families rather than to food tourists, the community centre networks and the mosque and the Bengali press and the social infrastructure of a community that built its life in this postcode when it was affordable and when the word “fashionable” would not have been applied to it by anyone outside it. These two Brick Lanes share a postcode and share a street and relate to each other in ways that are sometimes harmonious and sometimes not.
The Curry Mile and Its Mythology
The cluster of Bangladeshi-owned curry restaurants at the southern end of Brick Lane has been one of London’s most famous eating destinations for decades. The mythology around it — that these are the best curries in London, that eating here is an authentic cultural experience, that the street touts who accost pedestrians outside the restaurants are a charming local custom — is partly true and partly constructed. The restaurants are genuine businesses run by genuine people cooking food from a genuine culinary tradition. They are also, in many cases, running a version of their menu calibrated for the visitor market rather than the community market, which is a rational business response to the fact that the visitor market is the dominant audience on the street at the times when most money is spent there.
The best Bengali food in the area is not, in the experience of most people who know the community well, in the tourist-facing restaurants on Brick Lane. It is in the community-facing restaurants and cafes on Whitechapel Road and the side streets off Commercial Road, where the menu has not been adjusted for a palate that expects dishes to be milder and portions to be presented in a certain way, and where the audience is the community eating its own food rather than visitors eating a version of the community’s food that has been modified for their comfort. These places are not secret. They are simply not on the lists that recommend Brick Lane, which recommend Brick Lane because Brick Lane is the addressable destination, not because it is the best available expression of what Bengali cuisine in East London actually is.
The Displacement Story
The Bangladeshi community that built Brick Lane arrived in an area that was affordable because it had been abandoned by previous waves of immigrants — the Huguenot weavers, the Jewish community that preceded the Bangladeshis in this same geography of arrival and settlement. The community that built the restaurants and the fabric shops and the mosque that was previously a synagogue that was previously a Huguenot chapel is now experiencing the pressure of the same economic forces that displaced those previous communities: rising rents, increasing commercial and residential property values, the attraction of the area to a higher-income population that can outcompete the community-serving businesses for the limited commercial space available.
The fabric shops are fewer than they were. The community-serving businesses are more concentrated at the northern end of the street and in the side streets off it. The restaurants remain because they serve the tourist market that now outnumbers the community market on the street at peak hours. The street’s character is maintained by the businesses that remain while the community that produced that character is under pressure that the street’s own success has accelerated. This is the pattern of Brick Lane’s entire history: a community builds something, the something becomes valued, the value drives the community out. The history is documented in the Huguenot chapel that became a synagogue that became a mosque. The current chapter is being written in the fabric shops that are becoming coffee shops and the community spaces that are becoming event venues. The street remembers longer than any individual use of it. Whether the current community will have enough time to leave its permanent mark is the question that the economics of the postcode is in the process of answering.
The specific form of displacement that Brick Lane’s Bangladeshi community is experiencing differs from the displacement of the area’s earlier immigrant communities in one significant way: it is happening in a media environment that can document and publicise it, and in a political environment where concepts like “heritage,” “community,” and “cultural preservation” have some traction in planning and policy discussions. The Huguenot and Jewish communities that preceded the Bangladeshis were displaced largely invisibly, their departure unremarked except in the historical record that later researchers pieced together. The current displacement is being documented in real time, which creates at least the theoretical possibility of a political response — listed building protections, asset-of-community-value designations, planning policies that favour community-serving uses in heritage areas — that might slow or partially interrupt the pattern. Whether that theoretical possibility translates into practical policy depends on whether the political will exists to prioritise community continuity over market outcomes in a planning environment that has historically weighted the latter more heavily than the former. The fabric shops that are becoming coffee shops are not individually dramatic losses. They are, collectively, the visible signal of a community being priced out of the street it built. Whether the signal is legible to the people who make planning decisions is the question that will determine whether Brick Lane’s Bangladeshi community can maintain enough commercial and community presence to have contributed something lasting to the street, as the Huguenots and the Jews did before them, or whether the market will have moved faster than the institutions can respond.
Harper-Thames writes from Shoreditch for The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine. Her homepage is at prat.uk/author/harper-thames.
Also reading the street at The Daily Mash | NewsThump | Private Eye
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/brick-lane-tourists-see-brick-lane-that-lives-there-harper-thames/
