We live in a tiny cobbled one-car-wide dead-end lane, near Brick Lane, London's most famous stretch of Bangladeshi/Indian eateries. We live in the only purely residential block in the street. We are joined by a Primary School, a printing business, a homeless men's residence, a community centre/aged care/residential facility, a pub and a carpark!
Our residence is also first stop on the various Jack the Ripper walking tours that run year-round. The fact that our building has 1886 on the top of it and is located in the area where some of the murders apparently took place has something to do with it but I suspect being in a quiet generally car-free is more the reason. We overhear the guides tell their groups how our building was built by a philanthropist for prostitutes to live in and get off the street, or how it was a 'doss house' for the poor who could only afford a few pence for the privilege to hang asleep (?!) over a rope strung from wall to wall to avoid being arrested for vagrancy... Maybe some of it is true.
Despite the views of many about living in Tower Hamlets, London's most deprived borough, we love it! We like being close to Liverpool St's transport hub, I can walk to work in 10 minutes; we love walking along Whitechapel Rd on a Saturday and being the only white people in sight, mingling among the saris and hijabs, the live fish and crabs in buckets, the bright and unfamiliar fruit & veg; we like passing the big Mosque on the way to the best 'Asian' food in the UK at Tayyabs or Lahore Kebab House and coming back past 'Baraka' restaurant (really!); we enjoy the Indian sweets in the Brick Lane shops (avoid the restaurants though!) and Bangla City with its 5kg bags of spices, huge tubs of yoghurt, okra, durian and metre-long frozen fish; we are members of the local library (great for travel books of course); our favourite local coffee shops are 'nude espresso' and 'Taylor St Baristas' (run by Aussies and New Zealanders respectively - of course!); and when friends visit from abroad, they always want to see Spitalfields Market and the Columbia Road flower market (pictured) - and we can just pop around the corner to join them. We are very lucky.
Wednesday 24 June 2009
The street where we live...
We live in a tiny cobbled one-car-wide dead-end lane, near Brick Lane, London's most famous stretch of Bangladeshi/Indian eateries. We live in the only purely residential block in the street. We are joined by a Primary School, a printing business, a homeless men's residence, a community centre/aged care/residential facility, a pub and a carpark!
Our residence is also first stop on the various Jack the Ripper walking tours that run year-round. The fact that our building has 1886 on the top of it and is located in the area where some of the murders apparently took place has something to do with it but I suspect being in a quiet generally car-free is more the reason. We overhear the guides tell their groups how our building was built by a philanthropist for prostitutes to live in and get off the street, or how it was a 'doss house' for the poor who could only afford a few pence for the privilege to hang asleep (?!) over a rope strung from wall to wall to avoid being arrested for vagrancy... Maybe some of it is true.
Despite the views of many about living in Tower Hamlets, London's most deprived borough, we love it! We like being close to Liverpool St's transport hub, I can walk to work in 10 minutes; we love walking along Whitechapel Rd on a Saturday and being the only white people in sight, mingling among the saris and hijabs, the live fish and crabs in buckets, the bright and unfamiliar fruit & veg; we like passing the big Mosque on the way to the best 'Asian' food in the UK at Tayyabs or Lahore Kebab House and coming back past 'Baraka' restaurant (really!); we enjoy the Indian sweets in the Brick Lane shops (avoid the restaurants though!) and Bangla City with its 5kg bags of spices, huge tubs of yoghurt, okra, durian and metre-long frozen fish; we are members of the local library (great for travel books of course); our favourite local coffee shops are 'nude espresso' and 'Taylor St Baristas' (run by Aussies and New Zealanders respectively - of course!); and when friends visit from abroad, they always want to see Spitalfields Market and the Columbia Road flower market (pictured) - and we can just pop around the corner to join them. We are very lucky.
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