East London’s best-known neighbourhood rewards a visitor who goes on the right day, starts at the right end and knows which queue is worth joining
Visiting Shoreditch: A Sunday Itinerary
Most visitors to London spend their time in the west and centre: the palaces, the museums, the theatres. All excellent. But if you want to see where Londoners under forty actually go, you need to get on a train heading east.
Shoreditch is the usual destination. A recent area guide sums up its reputation as street art, tech start-ups, nightlife and Brick Lane, and lists its markets: Old Spitalfields daily, Brick Lane on Sundays, and Columbia Road Flower Market on Sundays from eight until three, which it marks as a must-visit.
That last detail is the key to the whole thing. Go on a Sunday.
Why Sunday
On a weekday Shoreditch is an office district with good coffee. On a Friday or Saturday night it is a very loud party. On a Sunday it is a string of markets you can walk between in a morning, and it is at its most charming.
Getting There
The simplest way is the Overground to Shoreditch High Street or Hoxton. From central London, Liverpool Street is ten minutes’ walk from Spitalfields, and Old Street on the Northern line is at the western edge.
Old Street station, incidentally, used to sit beneath a notorious roundabout. The junction has been rebuilt in recent years, with a new entrance at street level, so if an older guidebook tells you to find your way out through a maze of subways, ignore it.
The Route
I suggest doing it north to south. Start with the flowers, while they are fresh and before the crowds, and finish at Spitalfields, where there is somewhere to sit.
Columbia Road, 9am
From Hoxton station it is a ten-minute walk. You will know you are close when you start meeting people carrying trees.
Columbia Road is a narrow Victorian street that turns into a flower market every Sunday. Stalls line both sides. The traders shout their prices in the old manner: “Three for a tenner, come on now.” It is packed, fragrant and very photogenic.
The shops behind the stalls are worth a look too: small independents selling pottery, prints, hats and garden things. Many open only on Sundays. The side streets have cafes and a man who sells oysters.
Go early. By eleven you cannot move. In the last hour, after two, the traders sell off what is left very cheaply, which is useful to know if you have somewhere to put a bunch of lilies.
The Boundary Estate, 10am
Walking south you pass through a group of handsome red-brick blocks arranged around a raised garden with a bandstand. This is the oldest council housing estate in the country, opened in 1900 on the site of a notorious slum. The mound the bandstand sits on is made from the rubble of the demolished houses.
Climb up and sit for five minutes. It is the quietest spot in Shoreditch.
Brick Lane, 10.30am
Now the main event. Brick Lane runs north to south for about three-quarters of a mile, and on Sundays most of it is a market.
At the northern end, two bakeries a few doors apart sell bagels, spelled here the old way, round the clock. They have been rivals for decades. The classic order is salt beef with mustard and a gherkin. There is always a queue. It moves fast. Londoners have firm views on which shop is better and I am not going to get involved.
Further down, the old brewery with the tall chimney houses several markets under cover: vintage clothing, crafts, and a hall of food stalls from every part of the world. The streets around are full of second-hand stalls, some selling treasures and some selling a single shoe.
The southern half of the lane is the heart of London’s Bangladeshi community. The street signs are in Bengali as well as English. It is lined with curry houses, and waiters outside will try to persuade you in with offers. Some are good. A firm, friendly “no, thank you” is all you need for the rest.
Look for the building on the corner of Fournier Street. It was built as a Protestant church for French refugees in the 1740s, became a Methodist chapel, then a synagogue, and is now a mosque. The whole history of the area in one set of walls.
The Street Art
You will have noticed by now that the walls are painted. Shoreditch is, as that area guide puts it, a kind of outdoor gallery, constantly changing as artists paint over each other.
The best concentrations are in the side streets off Brick Lane, around the car park on Sclater Street, and along Rivington Street and Great Eastern Street to the west. Some pieces are by internationally known names. Most will be gone in a few months.
You do not need a tour, though there are good ones. Just turn down any alley and look up.
Spitalfields, 12.30pm
At the bottom of Brick Lane, turn right along Fournier Street. This is one of the best-preserved streets of early Georgian houses in London, built for silk merchants in the 1720s. At the end is a great white church by a pupil of Christopher Wren.
Opposite is Old Spitalfields Market. A Victorian market hall, now roofed in glass, with stalls selling clothes, jewellery, art and a great deal of food. It is busier and more polished than Brick Lane. It has seats. Have lunch.
What to Know
Cash. Most stalls take cards now. A few do not. Bring some.
Crowds. Sunday is busy. If you dislike being jostled, do Columbia Road at eight and be gone by ten.
Pickpockets. They like markets. Front pockets, closed bags.
Toilets. Spitalfields Market and the larger cafes.
Photographs. The stallholders at Columbia Road are used to it. On Brick Lane, ask before photographing people or their goods.
Two Opinions
Not everyone loves it, and you should hear why.
Some Londoners will tell you that Shoreditch is over. That it was interesting twenty years ago when artists lived in cheap warehouses, and is now a theme park of itself: expensive coffee, chain versions of independent shops, and visitors photographing a wall.
There is something in that. Rents have driven out much of what made the name. You will see as many tourists as locals on Brick Lane on a Sunday.
The other view is that it remains one of the most layered square miles in the city. Three centuries of immigration, a great market tradition, real street life. The flower market is not put on for visitors. The bagel shops were there long before the galleries.
I think both are true. Go for the flowers and the history, enjoy the rest for what it is, and do not expect to discover anything nobody has found before.
If You Have the Afternoon
The Museum of the Home, near Hoxton station, is free and shows how English living rooms have looked over four hundred years. Dennis Severs’ House, near Spitalfields, is a candlelit time capsule of an eighteenth-century weaver’s home and must be booked. Or simply find a pub with a garden.
The London Prat has been unfashionably east since before it was fashionable and covers the district in its English satirical news on a Sunday in Shoreditch and its UK satirical news about photographing a wall. Bohiney Magazine covers the American equivalent, which is in Brooklyn and costs more.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
