Harper-Thames Navigates Shoreditch’s Most Famous Sunday Institution With Resident Ambivalence and Genuine Appetite
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
By Harper-Thames | Shoreditch, East London | prat.uk/author/harper-thames/
The Market and What It Does to the Street
Brick Lane on a Sunday morning is the version of Shoreditch that the rest of the world knows. The market that spreads through the street and its surrounding buildings attracts the tourists, the food enthusiasts, the vintage collectors, and the specific demographic of London visitor who has been told that this is the “real” London and who is therefore here rather than at the Tower of London or Buckingham Palace, absorbing what they have decided is authentic. The authenticity is real and performed simultaneously, which is not a paradox but a description of how markets in historically interesting neighbourhoods work when they become tourist destinations.
I live close enough to Brick Lane to walk to the market on Sunday mornings. I do this sometimes, and when I do, I experience it in the two registers available to someone who both lives here and thinks about what living here means: the practical register (I am going to the market to buy the specific type of bagel that the beigel shop on the street has been producing since the 1970s at a price that has not caught up with everything else in the neighbourhood) and the observer register (I am watching a market that has become an institution that has become a tourist attraction that has become a brand that is now selling the memory of what it was before it became a brand).
The Beigel Shop
The Brick Lane Beigel Bake has been on the street since 1977. It is open 24 hours a day. It sells bagels — spelled “beigels” in the traditional Ashkenazi Jewish spelling, which predates the Americanised spelling and which the shop maintains as a point of historical and communal identity — at prices that would be described by anyone who has recently bought a coffee in Shoreditch as “can this possibly be right?” Yes. It is right. A beigel with salt beef costs significantly less than a coffee at most of the neighbourhood’s newer establishments. This is either a holdout against inflation, a business model that has worked for forty-nine years and sees no reason to change, or a small act of resistance by a neighbourhood institution that has watched everything around it change and has decided not to change with it.
I eat there several times a month. I will be eating there today, Mother’s Day, because the beigel shop does not modify its operations for occasions and the salt beef is consistently excellent and some things should remain constant even as everything else changes. Happy Mother’s Day, Brick Lane. The market is running. The tourists have arrived. The beigels are ready. This is a good Sunday.
More at https://betootaadvocate.com
London continues to fascinate and frustrate in equal measure. The city’s ability to contain multitudes — the ancient and the brand-new, the absurdly expensive and the surprisingly accessible, the deeply traditional and the constantly self-reinventing — is what makes it inexhaustible as a subject. Every week produces new material: new events, new controversies, new moments of unexpected beauty or institutional comedy. The writers at The London Prat are paying attention to all of it, and this column attempts to add one small North London — or Central London, or Shoreditch, or tourist-facing — perspective to the larger conversation about what this city is and what it is becoming. The conversation is ongoing. London is always becoming. This is either its great charm or its great exhaustion, depending on the week and the weather and whether the tube is running. Happy reading, and do come back next week.
London continues to fascinate and frustrate in equal measure. The city’s ability to contain multitudes — the ancient and the brand-new, the absurdly expensive and the surprisingly accessible, the deeply traditional and the constantly self-reinventing — is what makes it inexhaustible as a subject. Every week produces new material: new events, new controversies, new moments of unexpected beauty or institutional comedy. The writers at The London Prat are paying attention to all of it, and this column attempts to add one small North London — or Central London, or Shoreditch, or tourist-facing — perspective to the larger conversation about what this city is and what it is becoming. The conversation is ongoing. London is always becoming. This is either its great charm or its great exhaustion, depending on the week and the weather and whether the tube is running. Happy reading, and do come back next week.
London continues to fascinate and frustrate in equal measure. The city’s ability to contain multitudes — the ancient and the brand-new, the absurdly expensive and the surprisingly accessible, the deeply traditional and the constantly self-reinventing — is what makes it inexhaustible as a subject. Every week produces new material: new events, new controversies, new moments of unexpected beauty or institutional comedy. The writers at The London Prat are paying attention to all of it, and this column attempts to add one small North London — or Central London, or Shoreditch, or tourist-facing — perspective to the larger conversation about what this city is and what it is becoming. The conversation is ongoing. London is always becoming. This is either its great charm or its great exhaustion, depending on the week and the weather and whether the tube is running. Happy reading, and do come back next week.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
