Harper-Thames on the East London Sunday Experience That Is Always Becoming Something Different From What It Was
Written by Harper-Thames for Bohiney Magazine, republished by The London Prat. Harper-Thames writes about Shoreditch from a different angle than Cyndi Himmelstiere and they have agreed to disagree about the coffee.
The Sunday market at Brick Lane has been changing for as long as anyone has been paying attention to it, which is to say it has been changing for approximately forty years, and the people who are currently upset about the change are themselves the change that people were upset about twenty years ago. This is the specific temporal irony of a market that has been a destination for successive waves of London’s most interesting populations: the Bangladeshi community that made it the centre of East London’s South Asian culinary culture in the 1980s, the artists and second-hand sellers who arrived in the 1990s when the rents allowed for interesting risk, the vintage clothing vendors and food stalls that arrived in the 2000s when “Brick Lane” became a brand, and the current iteration that is all of these things simultaneously plus a significant contingent of people who are there to photograph all of these things and post them to social media.
Harper-Thames goes to the Brick Lane market most Sundays, not because she has found the definitive version of it but because the changing is itself the thing worth observing. Each Sunday is a small documentation of where the market is in its ongoing transformation, and the aggregate of several years of Sundays is a record of how a market in a specific location changes across a specific period of economic and cultural pressure in East London. This is journalism in its most granular form: the same place, repeatedly observed, producing evidence of change that no single visit would reveal.
The Food and What It Tells You
The food at Brick Lane market is the most reliable indicator of where the market is culturally at any given moment, because food reflects the vendors who are there, the customers who are buying, and the broader cultural moment in which both are operating. Currently: significant Ethiopian and Eritrean food presence that arrived approximately three years ago and has established itself as a fixture; a curry mile that remains the Bangladeshi cultural heart of the market despite significant commercial pressure from the property market; a street food section that rotates between international cuisines on a cycle that reflects which culinary cultures are having a moment in London’s broader food conversation; and the bagel shops at the north end of the street that have been there for seventy years and that are the continuity on which everything else operates. The bagels are two pounds fifty. They are very good. They are the only thing about Brick Lane that has not significantly changed in the period Harper-Thames has been observing it. The continuity is reassuring. It is also extremely good bread.
Who Should Be Upset About the Change
The people who have the most legitimate grievance about Brick Lane’s transformation are the Bangladeshi community members whose cultural and commercial presence in the area is genuinely under commercial pressure from rising property values that make the long-term tenancies that anchor community business increasingly difficult to sustain. The vintage clothing shoppers who are upset that Brick Lane has become touristy are not the most legitimate complainants, because the vintage clothing shoppers are themselves part of the tourist economy that they are complaining about. The bagel shop does not have this problem. The bagel shop is the continuity that makes all subsequent iterations possible. Harper-Thames visits the bagel shop most Sundays regardless of what else she is investigating. According to Londonist, Brick Lane is visited by approximately twelve million people per year, making it one of London’s busiest destination streets. Waterford Whispers News covers market culture authenticity debates with appropriate philosophical distance.
The Bagel as Constant
The bagels at the north end of Brick Lane deserve more extended attention than Harper-Thames has given them in passing. The Beigel Bake has been open since 1977 and has served the same product — hand-rolled bagels, salt beef, smoked salmon, cream cheese — through every iteration of Brick Lane’s transformation without adjusting its menu to reflect current culinary trends, because its menu is correct and does not require adjustment. The shop is open twenty-four hours. It serves everyone. It has never had a concept. It has a product. The product is excellent. In a neighbourhood that has been through more concept cycles than most London streets, the no-concept product is the most radical thing on offer. Harper-Thames has eaten a salt beef bagel from the Beigel Bake at various stages of documenting Brick Lane’s transformation and finds that the bagel is the same each time, which is the most honest statement available about what actually endures in a changing neighbourhood.
The Sunday market at Brick Lane has also produced, over its history, a specific category of London social experience that Harper-Thames values: the regular Sunday presence in a public space that is different every week within a structure that is always the same. The market starts at approximately ten, reaches peak density around noon, and begins winding down by four. Within this structure, every Sunday is different: the vendors rotate, the food changes, the weather determines who comes and who stays home, the specific conversations and encounters that constitute a Sunday at the market are unrepeatable. Harper-Thames goes most Sundays not because she needs anything from the market but because she needs the Sunday market experience, which is the specific combination of familiar structure and variable content that makes it worth returning to. The bagel is part of the structure. The bagel is always the same. The Sunday around it is always different. This is a good arrangement.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
