Stop 3: The Sunday 'Upmarket'
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The Sunday Upmarket, is a covered fashion market that started in 2004 and now has over a hundred stalls, mostly young designers starting out in business. This is a good place to consider the transformation of the East End, from a squalid ghetto to the place to be.
Before the early 1990s there was not much here besides Bengali restaurants and shops and the decaying remnants of the old Jewish rag trade. In fact, the Borough of Tower Hamlets still has a lot of deprived areas, many people without skills and jobs, and poor health records. About 1 in 5 people in Tower Hamlets cannot afford to buy a beer in the bars you see around you, because they live below the poverty line and earn less than 15K per annum.
Since it is a deprived borough, the Council has managed to secure millions of pounds of funding to 'renew their neighbourhoods', details of which can be found in their Community Plan. Unfortunately, despite all the money invested, this plan does not address the issue of jobs, wages or affordable homes.
The preoccupation with 'community' is also a rather narrow conception that sees people as static, culturally distinct and different, grounded in their locality and in need of recognition and even preservation. In many ways this fatalistic view of a divided and fixed humanity is the antithesis of the ideas of the Enlightenment in the 1700s which promoted the idea of a universal human potential. Even the history of this area tells us communities are not a fixed geographical or cultural phenomena, people mix, move on, move out and change as do cultural traditions and ideas.
Back in the 19th and much of the early 20th century, the East End was dirty and overcrowded; so much so that the majority of the children died before they reached the age of 5. Needless to say people wanted to get out of here. In 1826, at a time of great poverty in the East End, gangs of 500 to 600 strong met nearby in Brickfield in Speicer Street, now Buxton Street to cook food stolen from shops in mass steamings, and meat they had stolen by ambushing the drovers taking their animals to the Smithfields and Barnet markets.
Nowadays, much of Brick Lane has been gentrified, it is even a designated Good Behaviour Zone, a GBZ. This means the police have special powers to deal with what is considered anti-social behaviour and punish people who drop litter.
It is interesting to note that the Sunday Upmarket also demarcates the two sides of Brick Lane, fashion one side, curry restaurants on the other. Of course, this division only came into being in the mid-90s when artists and young entrepreneurs took advantage of the – then – cheap rents. This division may change again with the new immigration points system. Up until now curry houses have been able to hire their chefs from Bangladesh, but since many of these skilled chefs do not possess officially recognised qualifications they will not be allowed in anymore. Perhaps in a few years time, even the curry houses will be gone.
