Two bakeries a few doors apart tell the whole history of an East End street that has belonged to everyone in turn
Salt Beef at Three in the Morning: Brick Lane’s Beigel Shops and the Street That Keeps Changing
There is a queue on Brick Lane that never goes away. It is there at lunchtime, made up of tourists and builders. It is there at midnight, made up of people who have been out. It is there at four in the morning, when it consists of cab drivers, nurses coming off shift, clubbers who have lost their friends and one man in a dinner jacket whom nobody questions. They are all waiting for the same thing: a warm beigel filled with salt beef and a streak of mustard strong enough to clear the sinuses of a horse.
I have stood in that queue at most hours, in most conditions, and I regard it as the nearest thing Shoreditch has to a parish pump. If you want to understand this street, and how many different peoples have called it home, the bakery counter is the place to begin.
First, the Spelling
It is a beigel. Not a bagel. The older spelling reflects the Yiddish of the Jewish families who settled in the East End in great numbers from the 1880s, fleeing persecution in the Russian empire, and it is pronounced to rhyme with Michael. Ask for a bagel and you will be served without comment, but you will have marked yourself as a visitor.
The method is traditional. The rings of dough are boiled before they are baked, which gives the chewy inside and the slight shine. They are smaller and denser than the American kind. You may have yours with smoked salmon and cream cheese, with chopped herring, or with thick slices of hot salt beef carved to order, which is the one people cross London for.
Two Shops
For decades there have been two beigel bakeries at the northern end of the lane, a few doors apart, one with a white sign and one with a yellow one. Every regular has a loyalty and will defend it with some heat. The white-signed shop, Beigel Bake, opened in 1974 and has famously stayed open around the clock. The yellow-signed shop proclaims an older origin, in the nineteenth century, and has had its ups and downs in recent years, including a spell with the shutters down that caused real alarm in the neighbourhood before it traded again.
I decline to say which is better. I have friends on both sides and I wish to keep them. What matters is that both are survivors of a Jewish East End that has otherwise almost vanished from these streets. The tailoring workshops have gone. The synagogues have mostly closed. The beigel shops remain, and they are busier than ever.
A Building That Explains Everything
Walk south from the bakeries and you come to the corner of Fournier Street, where there stands a plain, handsome brick building with a sundial high on the wall. It was built in 1743 as a chapel for the Huguenots, French Protestant refugees who had brought the silk-weaving trade to Spitalfields. Later it was used by Methodists. In 1898 it became a synagogue for the Jewish community. In 1976 it became a mosque, serving the Bangladeshi families who by then lived all around.
One building, three faiths, each arriving as the last moved on. The sundial carries a Latin motto meaning we are shadows. I know of no place that tells the story of London so neatly. Its listing by Historic England records the details.
The Curry Mile
The Bangladeshi community, many from the region of Sylhet, settled here from the 1960s and 1970s and worked at first in the clothing trade. As that declined, families opened restaurants. By the 1990s the southern stretch of Brick Lane was lined with curry houses, the council had adopted the name Banglatown for the area, and the street was known across the country as the place to go for an Indian meal, cooked for the most part by Bangladeshis.
That trade is now in difficulty. The number of curry restaurants on the lane has fallen by well over half since its peak, according to a much-cited study a few years ago. The reasons are several. Rents have risen steeply. Recruiting chefs from abroad became harder under immigration rules. The children of the restaurateurs have often gone into the professions. And tastes changed: the after-pub crowd that once filled the tables now has street food, burgers and a hundred other choices.
The Brewery Question
Looming over all this is the old Truman Brewery, whose chimney still bears the family name. Brewing stopped in 1989 and the site became a sprawl of markets, bars, studios and event spaces that did much to make the area fashionable. Plans to redevelop parts of it with offices and shops have met a determined campaign from residents and traders, who fear that it would speed the loss of the lane’s Bangladeshi character and of its small independent businesses.
The planning authority is Tower Hamlets, and the arguments have been fought through committee meetings, a public inquiry and the courts. The owners say the scheme would bring jobs and public space. The campaigners say the neighbourhood is being sold from under them. It is the old Shoreditch quarrel between money and memory.
What Stays
It would be easy to be gloomy. I am not, quite. Brick Lane has never stayed the same for more than a couple of generations. The street takes its name from the brick and tile works that stood here in the fifteenth century. The Huguenots gave way to the Irish, the Irish to the Jews, the Jews to the Bangladeshis, and every one of those changes was mourned at the time by the people being displaced.
What worries me is not change but the kind of change. In the past the newcomers were poor people looking for cheap rooms and a living. The newcomers now are investors, and they do not open bakeries. A street that has been home to refugees for three hundred years could end up being home to nobody in particular.
For the present, the ovens are still lit. Go late. Take cash in case the card machine is having one of its moods. Ask for salt beef with mustard and a pickle, and eat it standing on the pavement, as tradition demands.
The East End has its own language as well as its own bread, and the guide to Cockney rhyming slang is a fair primer. For laughs afterward there are the London satirical news pages and The Daily Mash, and should you read that a Brick Lane beigel has been named a protected monument, the checklist on how to tell satire from real news will set you straight. Not yet, is the answer. My other local reporting is on my author page at The London Prat.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk/
