Roaming Tales

Vintage clothes, art and stuffed squirrels on Brick Lane and Columbia Road.

Brick Lane, at the eastern edge of the square mile that is the City of London, is one of the most vibrant parts of London. It’s best known for the Indian and Bangladeshi restaurants that line the street and if you go at night you can barely move for the restaurant touts trying to entice you inside with various bribes of free drinks or samosas.

I prefer to get my curry elsewhere - at places such as New Tayyabs, a Pakistani restaurant behind the East London Mosque. And I prefer to visit Brick Lane during the day, especially on a Sunday when the Sunday UpMarket is on in the Old Truman Brewery and Columbia Road Flower Market is on up the road in Bethnal Green.

The Sunday UpMarket has great food - from Japanese to Ethiopian - in one half and secondhand and handmade clothes and other assorted flea market goodies in the other. It’s all under cover, which is perfect when it’s grey and drizzly outside as it so often is in London at this time of year.

As you wander further up the hill, you pass great cafés, famous bagel bakeries from the days when Brick Lane was a Jewish rather than Bangladeshi enclave, cool art galleries and around half a dozen great vintage clothing shops.

As you exit the northern end of Brick Lane and cross Bethnal Green Road, check out the contemporary furniture studio Unto This Last. Their best stuff is made to order as apparently they have had some problems with theft.

From there it’s just a hop, step and a jump to Columbia Road, which hosts a flower market every Sunday. I prefer to go late, around 2pm, when the crowds have died down and the flowers and pot plants are often on sale. This street is also full of funky independent shops. There’s the cupcake bakery Treacle (although cupcakes are not really my thing), a few gardening and homeware shops, and Nelly Duff gallery selling cool limited edition prints to name a few. If you’re still hungry after the Sunday UpMarket, the bagel bakery and cupcake shop, there’s a good Spanish restaurant called Laxeiro and the Royal Oak Pub.

There’s always something new to see in the East End. On my most recent visit, this past weekend, my eye was caught by the window display to a vintage clothing store halfway up Brick Lane, modestly called This Shop Rocks. The window display had two mannequins in dresses, one with a stuffed badger on a lead and one with a stuffed fox. There were also six stuffed squirrels wearing clothing dancing in a circle.

Have I missed something here? Is taxidermy back? Even though I’m sure they’re antique and not freshly stuffed, I actually found it a little disturbing, especially since they were rare, native red squirrels rather than the more common, foreign grey squirrels. They were cute but creepy.

It certainly got my attention but when it came down to it, none of us wanted to go in. Maybe the shop does rock but I might never know.